Hi Doug,
I had been aware of this story before, but thanks for the link as it provided
more information than I had previously known.
It brings to mind the stories of Louis Slotin and Harry K Daghlian.
Both had worked on the Manhattan Project. A young Canadian physicist, Slotin
had been performing dangerous work to determine the criticality
of uranium and plutonium, in experiments that Richard Feynmann referred
to as "
tickling the dragon's tail".
Slotin had assembled the Trinity device and after the war in 1946, he was performing
a criticality experiment involving two beryllium half-spheres and a spherical
plutonium core. See picture here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ti...agons_Tail.jpg
A screwdriver slipped and one of the beryllium neutron reflectors slipped causing the
two halves to come together. The room began to glow and others in the room
felt the heat as the plutonium began to go critical. Despite the burning, Slotin
pulled the top beryllium sphere off with his hands and stopped the reaction.
He then went about recording the positions of his co-workers in the room
to help determine their radiation dose. Slotin died nine days later.
The same core had been involved in another fatal accident only eight months
earlier when Harry K. Daghlian accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick
onto it during an experiment. The bricks were being used as neutron deflectors
to try and determine how small a core could be to still reach criticality.
Since the pile was about to go supercritical, Daghlian pulled it apart with
his bare hands in order to further expose the core. He died 25 days later.
A story on Slotin appears here on Wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin
and a story on Daghlian here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_K._Daghlian,_Jr.
What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator!?
Clever lad...
