How a Screwdriver Slip Caused a Fatal 1946 Atomic Accident

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: A specially illustrated BBC story created by artist/writer Ben Platts-Mills tells the remarkable story of how a dangerous radioactive apparatus in the Manhattan Project killed a scientist in 1946. "Less than a year after the Trinity atomic bomb test," Platts-Mills writes, "a careless slip with a screwdriver cost Louis Slotin his life. In 1946, Slotin, a nuclear physicist, was poised to leave his job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the Manhattan Project). When his successor came to visit his lab, he decided to demonstrate a potentially dangerous apparatus, called the "critical assembly". During the demo, he used his screwdriver to support a beryllium hemisphere over a plutonium core. It slipped, and the hemisphere dropped over the core, triggering a burst of radiation. He died nine days later." In an interesting follow-up story, Platts-Mills explains how he pieced together what happened inside the room where 'The Blue Flash' occurred (it has been observed that many criticality accidents emit a blue flash of light). 15 years later there were more fatalities at a nuclear power plant after the Atomic Energy Commission opened the National Reactor Testing Station in a desert west of Idaho Falls, according to Wikipedia:The event occurred at an experimental U.S. Army plant known as the Argonne Low-Power Reactor, which the Army called the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One (SL-1)... Three trained military men had been working inside the reactor room when a mistake was made while reattaching a control rod to its motor assembly. With the central control rod nearly fully extended, the nuclear reactor rated at 3 MW rapidly increased power to 20 GW. This rapidly boiled the water inside the core. As the steam expanded, a pressure wave of water forcefully struck the top of the reactor vessel, upon which two of the men stood. The explosion was so severe that the reactor vessel was propelled nine feet into the air, striking the ceiling before settling back into its original position. One man was impaled by a shield plug and lodged into the ceiling, where he died instantly. The other men died from their injuries within hours. The three men were buried in lead coffins, and that entire section of the site was buried. "The core meltdown caused no damage to the area, although some radioactive nuclear fission products were released into the atmosphere." This week Idaho Falls became one of the sites re-purposed for possible utility-scale clean energy projects as part of America's "Cleanup to Clean Energy" initiative.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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