Demon Core

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

by agarttha • 7 years ago

153 55 7 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

grlass• 7 years ago

The authority on the subject: https://youtu.be/lJXwRdbbQ50

AceJohnny2• 7 years ago

Why "authority"?

dang• 7 years ago

tunnuz• 7 years ago

Didn’t know this! Really interesting

CodiePetersen• 7 years ago

Tickling the dragons tail seems very appropriate. I'd be sweating bullets manaually adjusting a nuke core with a screw driver.

errantspark2• 7 years ago

Not to advocate risky behavior, but this doesn't surprise me at all. Experience increases the perception of safety at a rate faster than actual safety. Every place I've worked where you could put yourself, expensive equipment or customer satisfaction in danger to make something easier for yourself people would do it. Deploying straight to prod, doing surgery on live databases, soldering on equipment plugged into mains, servicing a UPS without disconnecting 48V worth of lead acid batteries (that was one HELL of an arc weld).

The corners people will cut never cease to amaze me.

lucidstack• 7 years ago

Good old normalization of deviance: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25742063/

MaysonL• 7 years ago

This is why power paper cutters have two widely separated on buttons.

PhasmaFelis• 7 years ago

Experience increases the perception of safety at a rate faster than actual safety.

I learned to drive nine months ago, and I've been watching myself do this every time I get on the highway in the past few months. Even knowing that I'm doing it, it's hard to avoid.

bsder• 7 years ago

soldering on equipment plugged into mains

o_O!!!!!!!

I've cut a LOT of corners, but that one is just insane...

ClassyJacket• 7 years ago

The most common examples are probably driving and smoking.

Lowkeyloki• 7 years ago

I used the phrase "tickling the dragon's tail" recently when I ran some maintenance code in production without testing it first (because there really wasn't a way to test it outside of production, long series of failures to get to this point, I know). I used to call it cowboy coding.

FWIW, this was the first time I'd done something like that in about 5 years and I felt horrible during and afterwards even though nothing went wrong. I felt like I should have given up a sobriety coin or something. Feels bad. Like falling off the wagon.

jacobolus• 7 years ago

Or remove half of the bolts from top to bottom of a crane (instead of one level at a time) to speed up its deconstruction by a couple of hours?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_crane_collapse https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/what-caused-seattl...

shdh• 7 years ago

Hollywood portrayal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh89h8FxNhQ

Isxida• 7 years ago

There's a guy who is making a cartoon about the demon core.

https://youtu.be/Eyl3WQCttQ8

vilhelm_s• 7 years ago

I like this comment from Metafilter (https://www.metafilter.com/159810/Blue-flash#6535495):

This is a good occasion to ask yourself: am I including "now wedge a screwdriver in there" as part of some important work that I do? Shouldn't I use my screwdrivers only for driving screws, one might ask, and not for, say, keeping this plutonium assembly from going critical?

jefftk3• 7 years ago

There are lots of reasonable uses for flathead screwdrivers other than driving screws, though! Random examples:

* Many clips (dryer faceplate, window sash, ...) are designed to be pried open with a screwdriver.

* When repairing a popped drywall nail, a screwdriver is a good tool for removing the joint compound under the nail.

* When you buy a lock it usually comes with a rounded faceplate. To swap the faceplate, they'll tell you to use a screwdriver to pry it off.

A flathead screwdriver is a good tool for general light prying, not just for putting in slotted screws. This heuristic has a lot of false positives.

mplewis• 7 years ago

https://imgur.com/a/5Vc487x

klyrs• 7 years ago

Why hello fellow Craftsman loyalist! Did you also notice that my sibling's meme is an ad for a competing brand that doesn't have an unlimited return policy?

TheOtherHobbes• 7 years ago

Flathead screwdrivers are indeed very useful.

But I think you'll find that the iFixit Guide to Nuclear Warhead Testing recommends more specialised tooling.

dekhn• 7 years ago

a screwdriver is an exemplar of an inclined plane, so seems to make sense. I mean I guess you could have asked the metallurgists to make you a perfectly angled inclined plane on the mill (since everything else associated with the core was milled to thou precision) but that would just be wasting money.

hinkley2• 7 years ago

I've seen this page posted twice and both times it escaped me that this core had not one but TWO fatal accidents. Why didn't they build a rig??

yoctonaut• 7 years ago

Alex Wellerstein, author of the NYer article, has a bit more info on his blog (http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/05/23/the-blue-flash/), including an answer to the question of what happened to the core. (It was melted down into the overall plutonium stockpile, apparently.)

2bitencryption• 7 years ago

I'm wondering, even if everything had gone right and the dome had not been dropped to cause the core to go critical -- surely being in close contact with even a non-critical nuclear weapon core is not safe??

What's the amount of radiation that thing gave off simply from decay, in a non-critical state?

ceejayoz• 7 years ago

What's the amount of radiation that thing gave off simply from decay, in a non-critical state?

Not much. U-235 has a 700M year half-life. Pu-239's is 24,000 years.

You're more at risk from ingesting/inhaling bits of it.

errantspark2• 7 years ago

You're more at risk from ingesting/inhaling bits of it.

This is the vaaaast majority of the risk profile for radioactive anything.

The half life doesn't really tell you the whole story, Pu-239 mostly decays into alpha particles which is what makes it "safe", it's still not good for you, and very bad if ingested, but externally alpha radiation doesn't really penetrate deep enough into the body to be a big problem.

simonh• 7 years ago

The Uranium and plutonium isotopes used in weapons generally aren't themselves super dangerous in terms of radioactivity. The most dangerous radioactive elements produced in a nuclear explosion or disaster such as Chernobyl are the short half life fission products, such as isotopes of iodine, strontium, caesium, etc.

vermontdevil• 7 years ago

The scene is fictionalized in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy with John Cusack performing the role of Slotin under a different name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man_and_Little_Boy

Vaslo• 7 years ago

Came here to say this. At the time I saw this in the early 90s, it really disturbed me-an awful way to go for such a mundane act.

Hackbraten• 7 years ago

Before I clicked, I was convinced the article was going to be about some GLaDOS core that I’ve forgotten.

eprparadox• 7 years ago

i was fascinated with the criticality accident that claimed Slotin's life when i first learned about it. in particular, there was a schematic made up after the accident estimating everyone's distance to the apparatus and how much radiation they may have been exposed to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#/media/File:Sloti...

there was a second sketch made from that drawing which i also found fascinating. it doesn't add any additional information or analytical ability, but is just a sort of interesting and slightly dark translation of a rote schematic diagram into an artistic rendering of the event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#/media/File:Sloti...

I searched around for awhile trying to find the purpose and/or author of that second sketch but to no avail. however i did use it as the cover for an EP i released. please enjoy!

https://open.spotify.com/artist/37U37SYaXf1varqMgmpHkc?si=zE...

earthboundkid• 7 years ago

How ironic, that a bomb core would kill. Truly,

Demon Core

Related Stories