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The Demon Core
I came across a TikTok video about a Plutonium core designed as the third nuclear bomb in WWII that was not needed. Instead, it was kept at Los Alamos Laboratory for experimentation. It seems some scientists liked to "play" with the core and accidentally initiated a fission reaction on at least two occasions but were able to interrupt the reaction before the whole thing went boom. One of the scientists called his tempt of fate "tickling the tail of the dragon". In 1964, the dragon awoke long enough to kill him. He was not the first. It seems remarkable to me that they did not wipe Los Alamos from the map. VIDEO
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I don't recall ever having heard of those events :shrug:
My nuclear engineering courses were in 1969 when I was a senior. I'm thinking this might not have been made public at the time. As part of one of my classes we went to the Enrico Fermi 1 plant at Detroit Edison. It was a liquid sodium cooled breeder reactor that was Three Mile Island 2 on a small scale. The reactor was well on the way to critical and had melted some of the core when they managed to shut it down.
The "cause" was an undocumented modification to the core. Unlike TMI the operators followed procedures and the unit shut down as designed. It ultimately was repaired and refueled---but never reached full power and has long ago been deactivated.
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I've read about it before somewhere but I had forgotten about it. I just did a search and found lots of links. It appears that there was even a movie about it. Damn, what things we do in ignorance!
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I remember us having a thread about it here in the past...Nasty stuff...More info here...:read:...Ben
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The comments section was illuminating.
Personally, I think we have gained the ability to kill millions of people. May our leaders be wise enough to not use that ability.
Hunter
