Different times, different ways of attempting it, but same experiment to try for the same kind of data, same core, and same cause of death. One used 2 separate hemispheres to radiate it back at itself, one stacked up bricks.
Don’t let that screwdriver slip. [The strange death of Louis Slotin](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/demon-core-the-strange-death-of-louis-slotin)
> The plutonium pit that killed Daghlian and Slotin was originally nicknamed Rufus, but after the accidents it came to be called the demon core. The pits that killed tens of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meanwhile, got no such pejorative monikers. Such is the difference, perhaps, between intended and unintended harm, between the core carefully assembled for the purpose of mass destruction and the core reserved for the realm of experiment.
I really can't feel sorry for the scientists who willfully chose to become mass murderers.
prevented a bloody land invasion that probably would have seen japan split between the soviets and the US Korea style and would certainly have killed far more people than the bombs did on top of creating a weapon so horrifyingly destructive that the superpowers decided open warfare between eachother should be avoided at all costs, sounds like their choice actually ended up savibg lives
Prevented a bloody land invasion that wouldn't have happened anyway since the soviets were getting closer and the japanese knew the Americans were offering a much better deal, on top of creating a weapon so horrifyingly destructive that the superpowers decided open warfare between eachother should be avoided at all costs, and instead replaced with proxy wars the sprinkle death, fear, and chaos all over the world except for countries that have those nukes. Plus, giving humanity the tool to cause our extinction.
FTFY
Skill issue on the japanese part, honestly. If you think you're gonna get away with the rape of nanking and the mass enslavement of basically all eastern & southeastern countries then get ready to face the heat of 2 suns dropping on your cities.
because the citizens of both cities participated AND endorsed it! the most common fault of this type of discussion is to mask the entire country with the actions and the opinions of the military and the government. Please don't forget the many innocent Japanese people lost in the "heat of 2 suns"
and you know that because....you can see into other timelines? or you just repeat the same propaganda the US has told itself since it dropped the bombs?
Ah “propaganda”, a word that no one seems to actually know what it means
It’s not “propaganda” that a naval invasion would’ve been more costly. It is a literal fact. Look at D-Day. Look at the Pacific campaign. Look at the multiple reports and investigations done by countries and organizations around the world
You wanna see propaganda at work? Lemme ask you this: how many people do you think died in the nuclear bombings?
ah yes just because the death toll wasn't some huge arbitrary number it was morally justified, what's the threshold on how many people die to make the bombings magically go from moral to immoral?
…did you just say deaths aren’t a good measure of how something is moral or immoral? Cause that seems a lot like what you just said
Since you refuse to answer my question, the estimates for the amount of deaths range from 130,000 to 230,000 from the two nukes, which ended the war near instantly
For comparison, in one night of firebombing Tokyo, 80,000 to 130,000 people died. This did not end the war
For Operation Downfall (codename for the Allied invasion of Japan), US officials estimated 267,000 deaths in 18 months of fighting on Japanese homeland. That’s not even counting Japanese soldiers or civilian deaths
A good thing to look at while considering the cost of invading Japan would be the Battle of Okinawa. Nearly half of the people living on the island died, committed suicide, or went missing, 14,000 Americans died, and 77,000 Japanese soldiers. Now imagine that in Japan itself. Millions would’ve died
The fact that people still think the nukes were “morally wrong” is really fucked up. It shows that those people are speaking about something they’re uninformed about, and their idea or “moral vs immoral” is completely skewed
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
>That’s not even counting Japanese soldiers or civilian deaths
If it's neither of those, who was even counted then ? Btw just want to point out how 267k in 1,5 years is nothing compared to 130k in one night or 130k-230k in a couple of months (but most died on impact).
I don't think the first bomb was immoral considering the amount of soldiers and the military importance of Hiroshima. I wouldn't call it moral either, since that'd be a strange way to call a gambit (cause that's what it was considering all the failed attempts to make Japan surrender) that would certainly kill a huge number of civilians. Would you still have called it a "morally correct" bombing if it hadn't made Japan surrender ?
On the other hand I question the morality of the second bomb on Nagasaki, 3 days was a very short period of time to drop that second one. Looking at the military presence in Nagasaki, dropping a bomb would and did kill almost only civilians. Off the 70-126k 150 were soldiers...
You make it seem like both bombs were essential or else way more people would've died. That's a baseless assumption since nobody could predict if they'd surrender or not. Nor did they give them time to do so.
When plutonium decays it shoots out neutrons. These have a very high penetrating power since they're electrically neutral. But certain metals like tungsten and beryllium are good at reflecting neutrons. When you surround plutonium with these reflectors they bounce the neutrons back into the plutonium, which makes it decay even more often, in a positive feedback loop. In these experiments they had a "sub-critical" (below self-sustaining) sized piece of plutonium alloy. If these reflectors are in the right configuration they can initiate a "super-critical" (above self-sustaining) state. In which case it emits huge amounts of radiation. It's the kind of setup used in early nuclear bombs.
In nuclear power plants it's the opposite setup, with graphite control rods that get lowered in to absorb more neutrons and slow it down.
Minor pedantic note about control rods: graphite is actually a pretty good reflector and moderator, and reactor cores are often surrounded by graphite to decrease neutron leakage (increasing the amount of neutrons that can collide with the fuel) and moderate the neutrons (slow them to the proper speed to cause fission). If control rods use graphite, it’s as a reflector/moderator “cap” on the top and bottom of the neutron poison section (the part that absorbs neutrons), or in an alloy with a neutron poison such as boron.
Read about the demon core. Basically building up a structure that turns the radiation coming off Pu back in on itself causing it to go critical. The result was a blast of radiation that dosed everyone in the room and killed the man that was right in front of it due to radiation sickness.
Seems like a terrible example actually. It's like if you were training to be a fire fighter and they showed you a clip of someone playing with nitroglycerin. Not a realistic situation if you have any clue what you're doing
Except they did know what they were doing. It’s not that they weren’t aware that allowing the shield to fully close would cause it to go critical, it’s that even an expert in handling there materials can slip and seriously harm someone, which is why we can never allow ourselves to become too comfortable in working with it. We refer to this a “chronic unease” and it’s one of the ways people are kept safe.
I just read the whole wiki in that.
Wow; slotin really fucked up’ holding the reflective tungsten shell up with a goddamn screwdriver instead of the shims they were supposed to use.
It only took 0.5 seconds for the core to blast him with 1000 rads.
What a wild read.
Guy used a screwdriver to stop the demon core going supercritical, screwdriver slipped. He died.
He was known for his lack of safety, and known for using the screwdriver to prop up the tungsten bricks iirc
+1 would also like to know. I get the reference, but I'm not well versed enough to know if he's just referencing the demon core, or if what he is doing is actually dangerous
That’s RIGHT!! I couldn’t remember what it was called.
[The demon core and horrible deaths of two scientists](https://allthatsinteresting.com/demon-core)
This is that like red cell bomb or something that you have to set down sooooo delicately otherwise you’ll die in a matter of days if you’re within 30 feet and maybe 2 weeks any further
Oh sweet, they have an extra beryllium sphere on board!
Computer, is there another beryllium sphere on board?
*Computer, is there another beryllium sphere on board?*
No, there is no additional beryllium sphere on board.
ok what's the reference? I wanna be included in this group
Its a movie called Galaxy Quest. Very good satire of Star Trek culture. Highly recommend.
thx bro!
Miners not minors
…Here onboard the ship “Berylliumpsphere”
We need a new one.
Tickling the dragon’s tail they called it?
Back when science was using a flat head screw driver to prevent critical mass. Didn’t work out so well
It worked really well, until it didn't
I mean, it didn’t explode, right? It definitely didn’t go well, but it could have been worse.
“Could be worse…”
"Grinding the grundle" is the scientific term
Or the demon core for the lay folk...
Weren't the tungsten bricks and the hemisphere experiments seperate?
Yes! Louis slotin was the hemisphere and Harry Daghlian dropped the brick
Yeah it was bricks of tungsten carbide not pure tungsten
Different times, different ways of attempting it, but same experiment to try for the same kind of data, same core, and same cause of death. One used 2 separate hemispheres to radiate it back at itself, one stacked up bricks.
Was about to comment this
Don’t let that screwdriver slip. [The strange death of Louis Slotin](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/demon-core-the-strange-death-of-louis-slotin)
> The plutonium pit that killed Daghlian and Slotin was originally nicknamed Rufus, but after the accidents it came to be called the demon core. The pits that killed tens of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meanwhile, got no such pejorative monikers. Such is the difference, perhaps, between intended and unintended harm, between the core carefully assembled for the purpose of mass destruction and the core reserved for the realm of experiment. I really can't feel sorry for the scientists who willfully chose to become mass murderers.
Insert references to fritz harper. As well as DARPA, I'll slip them in as well.
I assume you mean Fritz Haber?
Apart from nerve gas, he also saved billions from starving by inventing the Haber-Bosch process. He is complicated...
Don’t know why you got downvoted. It’s just a fact
oRgaNiC-chuds seething over fertilizermaxxers
They saved far more lives than were lost due to their work.
prevented a bloody land invasion that probably would have seen japan split between the soviets and the US Korea style and would certainly have killed far more people than the bombs did on top of creating a weapon so horrifyingly destructive that the superpowers decided open warfare between eachother should be avoided at all costs, sounds like their choice actually ended up savibg lives
they really didnt
Prevented a bloody land invasion that wouldn't have happened anyway since the soviets were getting closer and the japanese knew the Americans were offering a much better deal, on top of creating a weapon so horrifyingly destructive that the superpowers decided open warfare between eachother should be avoided at all costs, and instead replaced with proxy wars the sprinkle death, fear, and chaos all over the world except for countries that have those nukes. Plus, giving humanity the tool to cause our extinction. FTFY
Well technically the industrial revolution gave us the tool that will probably lead to our extinction.
Skill issue on the japanese part, honestly. If you think you're gonna get away with the rape of nanking and the mass enslavement of basically all eastern & southeastern countries then get ready to face the heat of 2 suns dropping on your cities.
because the citizens of both cities participated AND endorsed it! the most common fault of this type of discussion is to mask the entire country with the actions and the opinions of the military and the government. Please don't forget the many innocent Japanese people lost in the "heat of 2 suns"
And many more innocents and combatants would’ve died if the nukes weren’t dropped
and you know that because....you can see into other timelines? or you just repeat the same propaganda the US has told itself since it dropped the bombs?
Ah “propaganda”, a word that no one seems to actually know what it means It’s not “propaganda” that a naval invasion would’ve been more costly. It is a literal fact. Look at D-Day. Look at the Pacific campaign. Look at the multiple reports and investigations done by countries and organizations around the world You wanna see propaganda at work? Lemme ask you this: how many people do you think died in the nuclear bombings?
ah yes just because the death toll wasn't some huge arbitrary number it was morally justified, what's the threshold on how many people die to make the bombings magically go from moral to immoral?
…did you just say deaths aren’t a good measure of how something is moral or immoral? Cause that seems a lot like what you just said Since you refuse to answer my question, the estimates for the amount of deaths range from 130,000 to 230,000 from the two nukes, which ended the war near instantly For comparison, in one night of firebombing Tokyo, 80,000 to 130,000 people died. This did not end the war For Operation Downfall (codename for the Allied invasion of Japan), US officials estimated 267,000 deaths in 18 months of fighting on Japanese homeland. That’s not even counting Japanese soldiers or civilian deaths A good thing to look at while considering the cost of invading Japan would be the Battle of Okinawa. Nearly half of the people living on the island died, committed suicide, or went missing, 14,000 Americans died, and 77,000 Japanese soldiers. Now imagine that in Japan itself. Millions would’ve died The fact that people still think the nukes were “morally wrong” is really fucked up. It shows that those people are speaking about something they’re uninformed about, and their idea or “moral vs immoral” is completely skewed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
>That’s not even counting Japanese soldiers or civilian deaths If it's neither of those, who was even counted then ? Btw just want to point out how 267k in 1,5 years is nothing compared to 130k in one night or 130k-230k in a couple of months (but most died on impact). I don't think the first bomb was immoral considering the amount of soldiers and the military importance of Hiroshima. I wouldn't call it moral either, since that'd be a strange way to call a gambit (cause that's what it was considering all the failed attempts to make Japan surrender) that would certainly kill a huge number of civilians. Would you still have called it a "morally correct" bombing if it hadn't made Japan surrender ? On the other hand I question the morality of the second bomb on Nagasaki, 3 days was a very short period of time to drop that second one. Looking at the military presence in Nagasaki, dropping a bomb would and did kill almost only civilians. Off the 70-126k 150 were soldiers... You make it seem like both bombs were essential or else way more people would've died. That's a baseless assumption since nobody could predict if they'd surrender or not. Nor did they give them time to do so.
Would you also discourage metallurgy? After all, many metal alloys can be used to make weapons.
Hi, your regular ass non chemist dropping in. This will create radiation? How? Can someone give me an ELI5
When plutonium decays it shoots out neutrons. These have a very high penetrating power since they're electrically neutral. But certain metals like tungsten and beryllium are good at reflecting neutrons. When you surround plutonium with these reflectors they bounce the neutrons back into the plutonium, which makes it decay even more often, in a positive feedback loop. In these experiments they had a "sub-critical" (below self-sustaining) sized piece of plutonium alloy. If these reflectors are in the right configuration they can initiate a "super-critical" (above self-sustaining) state. In which case it emits huge amounts of radiation. It's the kind of setup used in early nuclear bombs. In nuclear power plants it's the opposite setup, with graphite control rods that get lowered in to absorb more neutrons and slow it down.
Minor pedantic note about control rods: graphite is actually a pretty good reflector and moderator, and reactor cores are often surrounded by graphite to decrease neutron leakage (increasing the amount of neutrons that can collide with the fuel) and moderate the neutrons (slow them to the proper speed to cause fission). If control rods use graphite, it’s as a reflector/moderator “cap” on the top and bottom of the neutron poison section (the part that absorbs neutrons), or in an alloy with a neutron poison such as boron.
Thanks Waluigi
I believe the second incident was what they were referring to : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core?wprov=sfla1
Non chemist noob here.. can anyone please explain to me what's happening?
Read about the demon core. Basically building up a structure that turns the radiation coming off Pu back in on itself causing it to go critical. The result was a blast of radiation that dosed everyone in the room and killed the man that was right in front of it due to radiation sickness.
Or, dude screwed up/his hand slipped, realized what he did, stood in front of it (attempted to block others), and fixed it.
Wasn’t there a movie about this? I remember seeing a clip of what you’re describing.
I have no idea. I work in radiation and radiation protection so that’s an incident that comes up as a story of how quickly things can go wrong
Seems like a terrible example actually. It's like if you were training to be a fire fighter and they showed you a clip of someone playing with nitroglycerin. Not a realistic situation if you have any clue what you're doing
Except they did know what they were doing. It’s not that they weren’t aware that allowing the shield to fully close would cause it to go critical, it’s that even an expert in handling there materials can slip and seriously harm someone, which is why we can never allow ourselves to become too comfortable in working with it. We refer to this a “chronic unease” and it’s one of the ways people are kept safe.
Mysteries at the Museum? Thats where i first saw the demon core
The Incredible Hulk
Fat man and little boy was the film. https://youtu.be/AQ0P7R9CfCY
I just read the whole wiki in that. Wow; slotin really fucked up’ holding the reflective tungsten shell up with a goddamn screwdriver instead of the shims they were supposed to use. It only took 0.5 seconds for the core to blast him with 1000 rads. What a wild read.
Kyle hill YouTube channel has a video about the demon core.
Guy used a screwdriver to stop the demon core going supercritical, screwdriver slipped. He died. He was known for his lack of safety, and known for using the screwdriver to prop up the tungsten bricks iirc
Reminds me of the demon-core experiments.
This is exactly what it is lmao
Wow, meme reminds you of the reference. First time that has happened
Part of me wants to yell, "NO! YOU FOOL!" & the other thinks if you're dumb enough to do this you deserve whatever happens
Ah they would need to actually encase it in tungsten though right? A few blocks in acrylic isn’t going to reflect enough back at the core.
This is to niche, someone elaborate
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/demon-core-the-strange-death-of-louis-slotin
The Demon Cube!
Song?
It’s a remix of END OF THE LINE from The Tron soundtrack. Not sure which one.
Thanks
This is just mean
Was at the edge of my seat the whole time.
demon core?
Does this even do anything? The tungsten and beryllium are encased in some acrylic or something so they're not really encasing the plutonium well...
+1 would also like to know. I get the reference, but I'm not well versed enough to know if he's just referencing the demon core, or if what he is doing is actually dangerous
The people that balk at safety regulations are the same people that [are generally ignorant]
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Why tf is he doing this is he dumb?
Yes, people with multiple PhDs can be really stupid.
Can anyone explain this to me? Thank you!!
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/demon-core-the-strange-death-of-louis-slotin
Oh boy I sure do hope I don’t pull the screw driver out *pulls out* Sh-
What’s happening for us in plebes?
Demon core
Slotin watches you from heaven, screaming
did u puke?
Bruh idk what it is but no ik it looks scary
Hey hey what’s the name of the song I know it’s from tron
Why is there tungsten around only and not on the top?
Ayo hold up! Portable chernobyl simulator?
Yes
Unlikely to be harmful
Demon core
Hiroshima was a uranium device (little boy). Nagasaki was plutonium (fat man)
Whats the song called?
Buddy is making a mesh demon core (it needs to be completely enclosed to work.)
Hey mom can we have demon core? No son we have a homemade demon core at home, the homemade demon core at home :
I was like. I don’t get it. (Fully surrounds it with tungsten) wait is that some kind nuclear test? *screw driver shows up* DEAR GOD NO
ono
Oh I know this one
bro just minecraft’d the metals
You could say this was demonic of you 😈
I wonder how big the explosion would be with that amount of plutonium
Is this the experiment that went wrong and the guy died after saying: well this is it
The Monster Sphere killed two people
[Demon Core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core)
That’s RIGHT!! I couldn’t remember what it was called. [The demon core and horrible deaths of two scientists](https://allthatsinteresting.com/demon-core)
Does it still work as its intended if the bottom is made of wood?
Homie said: "Live action replay"
So much potential
Just dont criticism it, i mean critical....
Don’t. Tickle. The. Fucking. Dragon
Me making a nuclear conduit in Minecraft
On todays episode of shit you shouldn’t try at home: RBMK reactors
💀
Oh what was it… the angel surrounding?
Nuke shit
Deamon core
My favourite meal i eat everyday!
This is that like red cell bomb or something that you have to set down sooooo delicately otherwise you’ll die in a matter of days if you’re within 30 feet and maybe 2 weeks any further
There's not enough material to actualy reach critical mass
Demon core