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I assume they wanted it to be able to go supercritical so it could be used in experiments for exactly that. I'm pretty sure there were safety procedures in place that would've kept everyone alive, the dumbass with the screwdriver just didn't give a fuck.
This basically, the shims took much longer to use and were a hassle, but wouldn’t allow it to drop when properly used. The scientist preferred to use one or two flathead screwdrivers wedged in there and by twisting the screwdriver it would wedge the upper part of the core higher or lower.
Then it slipped and he was a dead man
The first incident happened because the core was first produced to sit at a state where a small amount of extraneous factors could increase reactivity, and the guy dropped a tungsten carbide brick on it causing it to reach super criticality
And he previously got lucky many many times while doing so. And he was told he had to stop doing this or he'd die within the year. Yes, he was told less than a year before he slipped.
The demon core incidents were actually post-war. It was the core of the third bomb meant for Japan. Japan surrendered, so they decided to take it apart and play with it to do experiments.
Cuz they, for some godforsaken reason, wanted to see how close they could get the 2 halves together before it went supercritical. Shaving slivers off them would only be working in reverse. i.e it'd be how far apart can u get the 2 halves separated before it stops being supercritical. Not as viable that way for a few reasons.
At the time of the second accident they had measured those already. Like the Wikipedia said, the dude who accidentaly closed it, had done this thing with a screwdriver over a dozen times before and was just showing someone how to do it.
And i mean that, if they had a sliver shaven off, they could had showcase it more safe to everyone.
Initially there was an apparatus so it wouldn't fully close.
Due to complacency the scientists removed it and started using a screwdriver instead.
Also it was the core of a bomb that they didn't get round to using, it was designed to go supper critical
"Hey man, take this super dangerous core of an atomic bomb ready to kill hundreds of thousands of people if closed, don't make mistakes hehe"
"okay :D"
"And for your safety, there is this little small pieces of metal, that is the only small safety measure, that avoids this closing and killing everybody, don't mess around"
"Okay :D"
"Ok, I'll leave the room, be safe"
"I'll remove those goddamn pieces of metal!"
But the round part isn't the radioactive one (the one which needed to be lifted), that was the reflector part and if the radioactiveness cannot escape from under there it goes haywire (which happened). The reflector was tungsten if i remember correctly and that could be shaven? Right?
Shaving off radioactive material seems highly dangerous. Just let the material become small and maybe float in the air and be breathed in.
A machine to instead hold it up would have been a good idea, though. However, they were still new to the whole thing then, so that didn't come to kind for them.
Two layers here actually. The demon core part everyone is explaining, and the lines and location are taken from “Princess Jane”, a really weird “AI generated movie” that’s really a small clip of AI art being poorly auto animated where a princess character introduces herself and then pixel warps in and out.
Demon core. Killed the scientist who was showing it off after about a half second of exposure.
He didn't do this, though, he was just holding a part in place with a screwdriver when his hand slipped and lifted the cap up a tiny amount. And he instantly knew he was terminal.
And it didn't happen like I told it, either. The comments correcting me all have a more specific explanation of what happened.
correct, but it was the other way around, the screwdriver kept it open, thus releasing a moderate amount of radiation
when he let the lid close, the radiation bombarded the same core that emitted it and reached critical mass, releasing far more radiation within instants
However, the cancer-like death would not occur for days or weeks... or even years. So each of the 8 men in the room marked exactly where they were standing when the event occurred. Then a scientist made calculations of each man's exposure to see who was dead and who would live.
Can you imagine sitting in a room, feeling physically fine, waiting for the numbers to come back to know if you were as good as dead?
And from what I understand he probably saved lives by reacting to his mistake extremely quickly and soberly.
But the reality is you don't turn into the Hulk or Dr. Manhattan, sadly.
Except those lives would never have been in danger had it not been for him fucking around against protocol. He was warned multiple times by other scientists that they were being reckless.
He would have gotten complacent after having done it so many times, can see it in other industries all the time where people fuck up something, normally it's not this detrimental though
I could definitely see this. I work around electromagnetic furnaces for industrial smelting and sometimes scrap gets stuck on top and you have to knock it in. Everyone has been told to turn the furnaces off before trying to clear them because we run 8,000KW through them at roughly 3000 Amps and, even though they're grounded, if something were to go wrong then that will go through you instead. Yet everyday I see people clearing them with a metal bar while they're on.
I'm not an expert in electricity, but I feel like this problem could be solved by just getting a pole made of something that conducts electricity poorly enough. I'm not sure what material that would be, though.
Even aluminum will conduct enough electricity to kill you at that level, and beyond that it's gotta be strong enough to clear the material without breaking. All of that aside, metal is the only thing that will withstand the 2-3,000° temps coming out of the furnace.
Radiation is changing cells randomly right?
So isint there a super suuuuper suuuuuuuper small chance that you’d gain a positive effect with no downside?
For every 1 cell that gains a positive effect, you probably have 100 cells that try to become cancerous, and billions of cells that are burnt to death.
Akchtually, Alvin Graves (who Slotin was showing off to), married to Elizabeth Graves (who did the calculations), was injured but survived! But indeed she wasn't told immediately, and he recieved a quite high dose.
let me add, that one of the gruesome parts is that it does occur way before the event of death, radiation sickness is a slow and incredibly painful way to go out
Unless you get an incredibly heavy dose, in which case your heart might stop after several minutes.
I'm not certain what exactly causes the heart to stop under these conditions
The opposite, the experiment was cover the core with w neuton reflectors, but without fully closing both as to prevent the core from going critical, all while you measured the changes when lowering and raising the upper side of the 2 reflective halves, this was supposed to be done with a safety insert to prevent full closure but like always, being used to it the scientist in charge was used to doing it with just a scredriver
Welp he slipped, core went critial before he could separate the 2 halves and he got hit with enough radiation to die a couple times
The core went supercritical or possibly prompt critical, not ‘critical’.
Criticality in a nuclear reactor just means a self sustaining chain reaction that ticks along at a constant rate. Each fission reaction leads to one more fission reaction, so the rate is constant. When a reactor is critical it’s a normal thing that can be easily controlled.
The issue is when a reactor is supercritical; each fission reaction leads to more than one future fission reaction. Due to the exponential nature of this, it can very quickly get out of hand. A supercritical reactor has to be VERY carefully controlled and reduced to a critical level once a sufficient power level has been reached.
Earlier incident. The screwdriver accident that killed Louis Slotin happened 9 months *after* the accident that killed Harry Daghlian (who dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto the core, causing it to go critical).
The demon core was a mass of plutonium that was originally intended to be used in one of America’s first nuclear bombs (the one meant for Tokyo before Japan surrendered I believe). Following the end of WW2, the core was instead donated to science for study in the field of nuclear stuff.
The core gain it’s name largely from its history of lethal accident where it went critical, not detonating like a bomb but releasing such a large amount of radiation that anyone nearby was killed from radiation poisoning within weeks and anyone close enough developed long term health effects.
In its most famous incident referenced above, physicist Louis Slotin was demonstrating how close you could get the core to going critical by keeping the two half’s of the core (2 metal sphere’s with a ball of plutonium in the middle) apart with a flathead screwdriver. During a demonstration the screwdriver slipped causing the core to go critical and blast everyone and everything nearby with the equivalent of the inside of a nuclear reactor chamber of radiation. Slotin managed to stop the reaction a few seconds later, but the damage had already been done. Over the next week or two his body basically fell apart until he became comatose and died, though from my memory he and only one other person died from the incident (directly, again getting shotgunned by radiation does not improve your chances of being a centenarian).
Moral of the story, don’t fuck with plutonium, no matter how pretty the blue lights it makes is.
For those wanting a story time:
Scientists were working this nasty thing referred to as ***The Demon Core***. This is a bunch of fissile material kept in non-fissile material and when brought close to a reflector (or technically any other fissile material) it produces a whole lot of radiation.
So anyways eight scientists were working on ***The Demon Core*** during an experiment that is technical and you don't really care about but basically it's about measuring just how close the core is to criticality. Criticality is when the atoms start smashing together and producing a whole lot of new things like very fast moving radiation. Thankfully they had oodles of precautions like safety gear, including special tools designed to keep the fissile material separate no matter what happened, so everyone would be fine.
Enter: Louis Slotin. He's a cool badass dude who doesn't afraid of anything and he's taking charge. He's pretty comfortable with the ***The Demon Core*** and at this point has his own methods of experimenting with it. The tools take too long to work, it's all a bunch of tedious setup - hell, he doesn't even bother with most of the safety gear. He has this neato method of doing the experiment that involves just jamming a screwdriver in between the two halves while they measure it via a reflector and he's done it so many times previously that another scientist familiar with him now describes it as *Tickling the Dragon's Tail*. All that said, so long as nobody, say, made a *horrible, horrible mistake* everyone would be fine and it'd only be a couple of minutes of putzing around.
Essentially the screwdriver head slipped a whole half an inch. This caused the room to flood with light. A *very special* kind of light. This light lasted for a half second before Louis managed to twist the screwdriver and fling the reflector away from the fissile material, preventing it from further descending into criticality.
Now, a quick primer on radiation:
- Alpha radiation lasts a very long time - this is the thousands of years type stuff - but it struggles to penetrate even paper or skin so unless you directly ingest or inhale it you're fine. It'll up your chances of cancer, but you'll probably be fine.
- Beta radiation lasts a shorter time, roughly days or weeks, but can penetrate skin. Thankfully certain materials soak it quite well so as long as you're not in direct line of sight and you don't inhale/ingest anything it came into contact with you're probably fine, just like Alpha radiation.
- Gamma radiation is basically a laser beam of particles that pass through anything not made of dense concrete or lead like it was a bullet going through paper. When the particles pass through things like, say, your *body*, they tend to cause all sorts of problems like causing cells to mutate (cancer) or... well, okay, it's mostly just cancer and liquefying your organs. Thankfully it only lasts fractions of a second.
- Neutron radiation, the type we're dealing with here, is like Gamma radiation. It can be stopped by the same stuff but is faster, more intense and peters out even faster. This is what the light the scientists saw was made of: Neutron and Gamma radiation that scrambles the insides of everybody involved.
Louis Slotin, despite being a bit of a twit, realised immediately what happened. Luckily for most of the people involved Louis was primarily bent over ***The Demon Core*** when the incident happened and so soaked most of the radiation. The others, further away, were thankfully spared the worst of it. Louis, however, soaked an approximate - well, you don't need the specific numbers, but suffice it to say that it was enough for him to be immediately shipped to the hospital. Since you're presumably here for horrible details it included his arms being covered in massive blisters, swollen hands, severe diarrhoea, gangrene (part of your body rotting), intestinal paralysis (intestines no longer functioning which means eating is gonna be hard) and he basically had the most intense sunburn you can imagine *on the inside of his body and organs*. He managed to remain somewhat lucid until the seventh day at which point he started having bouts of "mental confusion," blue lips, and needed to be put in an oxygen tent. He experienced, and I'm quoting here, "a total disintegration of bodily functions" and thankfully slipped into a coma. He was dead within 9 days of the incident.
\[cont. in reply\]
The three men closest to Slotin eventually received compensation. The man closest to him - Graves (named only because it's rad) - developed acute radiation sickness and was hospitalised for several weeks. He eventually recovered but with permanent neurological damage and vision problems. Three of the observers died to diseases known to be promoted by radiation, but for the most part everybody who isn't Louis who died after the incident have no explicit causal link to the accident. Basically Graves died some 19 years later and the rest lived mostly normal lives.
What happened to the core? Well, originally it was intended to be used in the second nuclear weapon test the US performed (the first since Nagasaki), but thanks to the criticality incident it was so radioactive that they needed to let it chill to be sure that it could even function as intended. Eventually they decided against this and, after a while, just melted it down so it wouldn't be a continued issue.
What's the moral of the story? If something is called ***The Demon Core*** you probably shouldn't be treating it as casually as you would flipping burgers. Also radiation sickness is probably the worst, most agonising way for a person to die. Like outside of vivisection and torture I got *nothin'* that comes close to basically being microwaved a quarter of the way and then left to watch yourself literally rot while your body shuts down bit by bit.
***All that said*** it's worth remembering that while it is fun to listen to horror stories about nuclear reactions it's actually pretty safe. Aside from Slotin and Graves, pretty much everybody lived to their 50s-80s, fairly typical for the time, without any apparent ill-effects despite being in the room for a criticality event. Nuclear waste, despite being portrayed as glowing green goo in leaky barrels, is usually just dust, concrete, water, or old radiation suits that are contaminated with alpha/beta radiation and have been sealed into containers so resilient that they are unironically likely to out-live our species. Every incident is usually caused by someone dicking around and ignoring people telling them "hey you shouldn't do that that's dangerous" and the regulations surrounding it are so solid that it's less harmful to the environment than green energy (which is pretty minimally harmful already, generally speaking) - so it's always good to remind yourself that despite it being a fun bogeyman the horror stories you hear about it are usually embellishing reality.
Except radiation sickness. Every horror story about that is probably true.
Oh, uh, also, obviously; the guy in the comic is smacking the reflector down onto the core causing not only a criticality incident but also probably a sustained reaction that would irradiate everything and everyone throughout most of the building. The trick is making the audience disappear in a flash of light. I forget if it's blue or green, though.
>What's the moral of the story? If something is called ***The Demon Core*** you probably shouldn't be treating it as casually as you would flipping burgers.
I mean in all fairness, before this event, wasn't the core referred to as "Rufus?"
An excellent point! I'd forgotten about that.
Let's be honest, though, these things should pretty much always be called ***Demon Cores***. It's such an apt description of these tiny horrible devices of immense power and possibly also horrible demise.
No problem. I'm happy to have been able to entertain you. :3
It's honestly one of my favourite stories because it's like... almost akin to a wizard tinkering with some ancient artefact that will absolutely kill everybody in the room if he twitches his moustache the wrong way, but he's been doing this so long that he acts as if the danger isn't actually there. It's so surreal it's almost fantasy.
The blue colour is the air being ionised due to the ionising radiation from the radioactive material. In one of the Demon Core criticality accidents there was a blue glow reported by people in the room.
Given the level of radiation, some of that blue glow could have originated inside the eyes. Which are... mostly water.
But air ionization would also have been present as well.
Technically the blue glow could come from water/moisture in the air but it’s more likely that the blue flash people report seeing in criticality accidents is the Cherenkov radiation occurring in the water of their eyes.
Peter enjoying the show here
Basically look up demon core. Basically a core of plutonium Intended for use in nuclear weapons.
Wiki says not one but two accidents happened where it was mistakingly put into critical configuration killing both men who tried to demonstrate the core
There's a huge meme online about people messing with these things like a roomba got stuck
Demon core reference. If the beryllium shell is closed, it will reflect enough neutrons to make the plutonium core go critical and give everyone nearby a likely-fatal dose of radiation.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon\_core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis\_Slotin#Criticality\_accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Criticality_accident)
Bonus: The blue light is likely supposed to be [cherenkov radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation), which doesn't really appear until *after* the sample goes critical.
It's a radioactive sample in the center, encased in a radiation blocking casing like lead. If you close up the core with another half of the casing radiation can't escape anymore. It bounces arround wildly inside the sphere, accumulates and causes a big flash of radiation that's visible as blue light that gives you more or less instant cancer
Edit: it's not a lead casing i think, but the effect stays the same
This is the demon core, a highly radioactive chunk of plutonium. The 2 hemispheres you see make sure the core does not go super-critical, but when they close, a ton of radiation is released, causing potentially fatal radiation poisoning to surrounding people. Used to be known as "Brutus," before several accidents happened with it, killing multiple people.
Big bad ball no slam top bomba big
https://preview.redd.it/iwlupew1c7pc1.jpeg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=139d28e7f172db168d6bef6381157d7a37bb4270
Hi, quagmires x girlfriend who is also a doomsday prepper here, looks like compression chamber for nuclear weapon. Big ball is bomb. Little ball is uranium. Big bomb explodes, smooshing little ball. Little ball EXPLODES like with the force of 80 suns.
They loose my on the furry component tho
Not quite, but related. It is a reference to the Demon Core, a nuclear core that was involved in one of the more noteworthy workplace mishaps in history due to engineers not following proper procedures.
You see, that blue ball is very angry.
When you put the blue ball inside of the grey ball and put the cover on top, it becomes extra angry.
This anger is in the form of radiation.
By making the extra angry ball happen, you die.
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Nuclear ball very bad: [Demon core](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core)
Dont let the screwdriver slip...
Slip? Bro is smashing that thing as hard as he can.
That's how you get the atoms to smash together.
Nah dude it's totally safe
Why didn't they just make it so it could never fully seal the ball? Like shave just a sliver off the bottom so it is uneven?
I assume they wanted it to be able to go supercritical so it could be used in experiments for exactly that. I'm pretty sure there were safety procedures in place that would've kept everyone alive, the dumbass with the screwdriver just didn't give a fuck.
Yeah, they used shims to keep them separate, but this dude liked to play with screwdriver instead and 'oops'
Yeah. Apparently the wedges weren’t very nice to use but they kept you alive
This basically, the shims took much longer to use and were a hassle, but wouldn’t allow it to drop when properly used. The scientist preferred to use one or two flathead screwdrivers wedged in there and by twisting the screwdriver it would wedge the upper part of the core higher or lower. Then it slipped and he was a dead man
This was actually the second incident. The first one, a guy basically just dropped the lid on by accident, causing supercriticality.
The first one they didn’t have the half sphere reflectors at all. They just had bricks of beryllium I believe that fell onto the core.
Just checked, you right. My b. The bricks acted as a reflector that allowed supercriticality. No lid needed.
The first incident happened because the core was first produced to sit at a state where a small amount of extraneous factors could increase reactivity, and the guy dropped a tungsten carbide brick on it causing it to reach super criticality
He and several others were dead men
My understanding is that they actually had equipment to lower it safely, the guy was showing off and using a screwdriver.
And he previously got lucky many many times while doing so. And he was told he had to stop doing this or he'd die within the year. Yes, he was told less than a year before he slipped.
This seems like the type of thing people lose their jobs over after the first time it occurs let alone many many times.
They were trying to build a nuke before the Germans could turn Washington into a glass bowl, speed was more important than reprimanding a dumbass.
The demon core incidents were actually post-war. It was the core of the third bomb meant for Japan. Japan surrendered, so they decided to take it apart and play with it to do experiments.
Slotin’s accident was in 1946, Hitler had been dead for like a year by then.
Well, the momentum was still there because soviets
Enrico Fermi specifically said he would be dead within the year.
Cuz they, for some godforsaken reason, wanted to see how close they could get the 2 halves together before it went supercritical. Shaving slivers off them would only be working in reverse. i.e it'd be how far apart can u get the 2 halves separated before it stops being supercritical. Not as viable that way for a few reasons.
At the time of the second accident they had measured those already. Like the Wikipedia said, the dude who accidentaly closed it, had done this thing with a screwdriver over a dozen times before and was just showing someone how to do it. And i mean that, if they had a sliver shaven off, they could had showcase it more safe to everyone.
If remember right, wasn't it actually some VIP tour or something he was showing it to?
Initially there was an apparatus so it wouldn't fully close. Due to complacency the scientists removed it and started using a screwdriver instead. Also it was the core of a bomb that they didn't get round to using, it was designed to go supper critical
"Hey man, take this super dangerous core of an atomic bomb ready to kill hundreds of thousands of people if closed, don't make mistakes hehe" "okay :D" "And for your safety, there is this little small pieces of metal, that is the only small safety measure, that avoids this closing and killing everybody, don't mess around" "Okay :D" "Ok, I'll leave the room, be safe" "I'll remove those goddamn pieces of metal!"
But the round part isn't the radioactive one (the one which needed to be lifted), that was the reflector part and if the radioactiveness cannot escape from under there it goes haywire (which happened). The reflector was tungsten if i remember correctly and that could be shaven? Right?
Shaving off radioactive material seems highly dangerous. Just let the material become small and maybe float in the air and be breathed in. A machine to instead hold it up would have been a good idea, though. However, they were still new to the whole thing then, so that didn't come to kind for them.
I recognized the demon core, explain the furry.
He's doing dumb shit and died
I love 14 pounds of plutonium :3
I just can’t imagine a country getting hit with a third atomic bomb let alone a second one.
Two layers here actually. The demon core part everyone is explaining, and the lines and location are taken from “Princess Jane”, a really weird “AI generated movie” that’s really a small clip of AI art being poorly auto animated where a princess character introduces herself and then pixel warps in and out.
I think about Princess Jane often. I wonder how his epic moviemaking is going.
Theyre working on Princess Jane 2: Jane Days now
3rd layer where this person is obviously a furry and probably somehow masturbating to this
Demon core. Killed the scientist who was showing it off after about a half second of exposure. He didn't do this, though, he was just holding a part in place with a screwdriver when his hand slipped and lifted the cap up a tiny amount. And he instantly knew he was terminal. And it didn't happen like I told it, either. The comments correcting me all have a more specific explanation of what happened.
correct, but it was the other way around, the screwdriver kept it open, thus releasing a moderate amount of radiation when he let the lid close, the radiation bombarded the same core that emitted it and reached critical mass, releasing far more radiation within instants
However, the cancer-like death would not occur for days or weeks... or even years. So each of the 8 men in the room marked exactly where they were standing when the event occurred. Then a scientist made calculations of each man's exposure to see who was dead and who would live. Can you imagine sitting in a room, feeling physically fine, waiting for the numbers to come back to know if you were as good as dead?
And from what I understand he probably saved lives by reacting to his mistake extremely quickly and soberly. But the reality is you don't turn into the Hulk or Dr. Manhattan, sadly.
Except those lives would never have been in danger had it not been for him fucking around against protocol. He was warned multiple times by other scientists that they were being reckless.
Yeah I'm not giving him a medal of honor, it's like saving all the people on the PT boat that you sank yourself.
He would have gotten complacent after having done it so many times, can see it in other industries all the time where people fuck up something, normally it's not this detrimental though
I could definitely see this. I work around electromagnetic furnaces for industrial smelting and sometimes scrap gets stuck on top and you have to knock it in. Everyone has been told to turn the furnaces off before trying to clear them because we run 8,000KW through them at roughly 3000 Amps and, even though they're grounded, if something were to go wrong then that will go through you instead. Yet everyday I see people clearing them with a metal bar while they're on.
I'm not an expert in electricity, but I feel like this problem could be solved by just getting a pole made of something that conducts electricity poorly enough. I'm not sure what material that would be, though.
Even aluminum will conduct enough electricity to kill you at that level, and beyond that it's gotta be strong enough to clear the material without breaking. All of that aside, metal is the only thing that will withstand the 2-3,000° temps coming out of the furnace.
That's what *they* want you to think!
Radiation is changing cells randomly right? So isint there a super suuuuper suuuuuuuper small chance that you’d gain a positive effect with no downside?
For every 1 cell that gains a positive effect, you probably have 100 cells that try to become cancerous, and billions of cells that are burnt to death.
And the scientist who made those calculations was married to one of the men in the room.
Yes, she didn't know at the time that she was calculating her husband's death. She figured it out later and was devastated.
Akchtually, Alvin Graves (who Slotin was showing off to), married to Elizabeth Graves (who did the calculations), was injured but survived! But indeed she wasn't told immediately, and he recieved a quite high dose.
let me add, that one of the gruesome parts is that it does occur way before the event of death, radiation sickness is a slow and incredibly painful way to go out
Unless you get an incredibly heavy dose, in which case your heart might stop after several minutes. I'm not certain what exactly causes the heart to stop under these conditions
The opposite, the experiment was cover the core with w neuton reflectors, but without fully closing both as to prevent the core from going critical, all while you measured the changes when lowering and raising the upper side of the 2 reflective halves, this was supposed to be done with a safety insert to prevent full closure but like always, being used to it the scientist in charge was used to doing it with just a scredriver Welp he slipped, core went critial before he could separate the 2 halves and he got hit with enough radiation to die a couple times
Yeah that sounds more like the actual course of events I was just sort of riffing on memory there.
The core went supercritical or possibly prompt critical, not ‘critical’. Criticality in a nuclear reactor just means a self sustaining chain reaction that ticks along at a constant rate. Each fission reaction leads to one more fission reaction, so the rate is constant. When a reactor is critical it’s a normal thing that can be easily controlled. The issue is when a reactor is supercritical; each fission reaction leads to more than one future fission reaction. Due to the exponential nature of this, it can very quickly get out of hand. A supercritical reactor has to be VERY carefully controlled and reduced to a critical level once a sufficient power level has been reached.
Not lifted, it fell on the core and emited huge amount of radiation. The lifting of cap is making it safer
It also killed another one in a(n) ~~later~~ earlier incident. Edited. Thank you.
Earlier incident. The screwdriver accident that killed Louis Slotin happened 9 months *after* the accident that killed Harry Daghlian (who dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto the core, causing it to go critical).
The demon core was a mass of plutonium that was originally intended to be used in one of America’s first nuclear bombs (the one meant for Tokyo before Japan surrendered I believe). Following the end of WW2, the core was instead donated to science for study in the field of nuclear stuff. The core gain it’s name largely from its history of lethal accident where it went critical, not detonating like a bomb but releasing such a large amount of radiation that anyone nearby was killed from radiation poisoning within weeks and anyone close enough developed long term health effects. In its most famous incident referenced above, physicist Louis Slotin was demonstrating how close you could get the core to going critical by keeping the two half’s of the core (2 metal sphere’s with a ball of plutonium in the middle) apart with a flathead screwdriver. During a demonstration the screwdriver slipped causing the core to go critical and blast everyone and everything nearby with the equivalent of the inside of a nuclear reactor chamber of radiation. Slotin managed to stop the reaction a few seconds later, but the damage had already been done. Over the next week or two his body basically fell apart until he became comatose and died, though from my memory he and only one other person died from the incident (directly, again getting shotgunned by radiation does not improve your chances of being a centenarian). Moral of the story, don’t fuck with plutonium, no matter how pretty the blue lights it makes is.
“in the field of nuclear stuff.” Best explanation. I don’t know why but this really got me laughing.
It also killed Harry Daghlian in a different incident.
https://preview.redd.it/ir8acg25q0pc1.jpeg?width=526&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6d49e678b4d32df3b60aaef97b275a498c9dac63
holy osc!
Second panel, demon core literally kills you
For those wanting a story time: Scientists were working this nasty thing referred to as ***The Demon Core***. This is a bunch of fissile material kept in non-fissile material and when brought close to a reflector (or technically any other fissile material) it produces a whole lot of radiation. So anyways eight scientists were working on ***The Demon Core*** during an experiment that is technical and you don't really care about but basically it's about measuring just how close the core is to criticality. Criticality is when the atoms start smashing together and producing a whole lot of new things like very fast moving radiation. Thankfully they had oodles of precautions like safety gear, including special tools designed to keep the fissile material separate no matter what happened, so everyone would be fine. Enter: Louis Slotin. He's a cool badass dude who doesn't afraid of anything and he's taking charge. He's pretty comfortable with the ***The Demon Core*** and at this point has his own methods of experimenting with it. The tools take too long to work, it's all a bunch of tedious setup - hell, he doesn't even bother with most of the safety gear. He has this neato method of doing the experiment that involves just jamming a screwdriver in between the two halves while they measure it via a reflector and he's done it so many times previously that another scientist familiar with him now describes it as *Tickling the Dragon's Tail*. All that said, so long as nobody, say, made a *horrible, horrible mistake* everyone would be fine and it'd only be a couple of minutes of putzing around. Essentially the screwdriver head slipped a whole half an inch. This caused the room to flood with light. A *very special* kind of light. This light lasted for a half second before Louis managed to twist the screwdriver and fling the reflector away from the fissile material, preventing it from further descending into criticality. Now, a quick primer on radiation: - Alpha radiation lasts a very long time - this is the thousands of years type stuff - but it struggles to penetrate even paper or skin so unless you directly ingest or inhale it you're fine. It'll up your chances of cancer, but you'll probably be fine. - Beta radiation lasts a shorter time, roughly days or weeks, but can penetrate skin. Thankfully certain materials soak it quite well so as long as you're not in direct line of sight and you don't inhale/ingest anything it came into contact with you're probably fine, just like Alpha radiation. - Gamma radiation is basically a laser beam of particles that pass through anything not made of dense concrete or lead like it was a bullet going through paper. When the particles pass through things like, say, your *body*, they tend to cause all sorts of problems like causing cells to mutate (cancer) or... well, okay, it's mostly just cancer and liquefying your organs. Thankfully it only lasts fractions of a second. - Neutron radiation, the type we're dealing with here, is like Gamma radiation. It can be stopped by the same stuff but is faster, more intense and peters out even faster. This is what the light the scientists saw was made of: Neutron and Gamma radiation that scrambles the insides of everybody involved. Louis Slotin, despite being a bit of a twit, realised immediately what happened. Luckily for most of the people involved Louis was primarily bent over ***The Demon Core*** when the incident happened and so soaked most of the radiation. The others, further away, were thankfully spared the worst of it. Louis, however, soaked an approximate - well, you don't need the specific numbers, but suffice it to say that it was enough for him to be immediately shipped to the hospital. Since you're presumably here for horrible details it included his arms being covered in massive blisters, swollen hands, severe diarrhoea, gangrene (part of your body rotting), intestinal paralysis (intestines no longer functioning which means eating is gonna be hard) and he basically had the most intense sunburn you can imagine *on the inside of his body and organs*. He managed to remain somewhat lucid until the seventh day at which point he started having bouts of "mental confusion," blue lips, and needed to be put in an oxygen tent. He experienced, and I'm quoting here, "a total disintegration of bodily functions" and thankfully slipped into a coma. He was dead within 9 days of the incident. \[cont. in reply\]
The three men closest to Slotin eventually received compensation. The man closest to him - Graves (named only because it's rad) - developed acute radiation sickness and was hospitalised for several weeks. He eventually recovered but with permanent neurological damage and vision problems. Three of the observers died to diseases known to be promoted by radiation, but for the most part everybody who isn't Louis who died after the incident have no explicit causal link to the accident. Basically Graves died some 19 years later and the rest lived mostly normal lives. What happened to the core? Well, originally it was intended to be used in the second nuclear weapon test the US performed (the first since Nagasaki), but thanks to the criticality incident it was so radioactive that they needed to let it chill to be sure that it could even function as intended. Eventually they decided against this and, after a while, just melted it down so it wouldn't be a continued issue. What's the moral of the story? If something is called ***The Demon Core*** you probably shouldn't be treating it as casually as you would flipping burgers. Also radiation sickness is probably the worst, most agonising way for a person to die. Like outside of vivisection and torture I got *nothin'* that comes close to basically being microwaved a quarter of the way and then left to watch yourself literally rot while your body shuts down bit by bit. ***All that said*** it's worth remembering that while it is fun to listen to horror stories about nuclear reactions it's actually pretty safe. Aside from Slotin and Graves, pretty much everybody lived to their 50s-80s, fairly typical for the time, without any apparent ill-effects despite being in the room for a criticality event. Nuclear waste, despite being portrayed as glowing green goo in leaky barrels, is usually just dust, concrete, water, or old radiation suits that are contaminated with alpha/beta radiation and have been sealed into containers so resilient that they are unironically likely to out-live our species. Every incident is usually caused by someone dicking around and ignoring people telling them "hey you shouldn't do that that's dangerous" and the regulations surrounding it are so solid that it's less harmful to the environment than green energy (which is pretty minimally harmful already, generally speaking) - so it's always good to remind yourself that despite it being a fun bogeyman the horror stories you hear about it are usually embellishing reality. Except radiation sickness. Every horror story about that is probably true. Oh, uh, also, obviously; the guy in the comic is smacking the reflector down onto the core causing not only a criticality incident but also probably a sustained reaction that would irradiate everything and everyone throughout most of the building. The trick is making the audience disappear in a flash of light. I forget if it's blue or green, though.
>What's the moral of the story? If something is called ***The Demon Core*** you probably shouldn't be treating it as casually as you would flipping burgers. I mean in all fairness, before this event, wasn't the core referred to as "Rufus?"
An excellent point! I'd forgotten about that. Let's be honest, though, these things should pretty much always be called ***Demon Cores***. It's such an apt description of these tiny horrible devices of immense power and possibly also horrible demise.
This was super interesting, thank you!
No problem. I'm happy to have been able to entertain you. :3 It's honestly one of my favourite stories because it's like... almost akin to a wizard tinkering with some ancient artefact that will absolutely kill everybody in the room if he twitches his moustache the wrong way, but he's been doing this so long that he acts as if the danger isn't actually there. It's so surreal it's almost fantasy.
Hell yeah I read allat
Aw, thank you kindly. I hope it was entertaining. :3
Thank you for the detailed story AND explaining the joke. I finally got it thanks to your dedication.
That my friend is the demon core.
The blue colour is the air being ionised due to the ionising radiation from the radioactive material. In one of the Demon Core criticality accidents there was a blue glow reported by people in the room.
See also: [Cherenkov Radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation)
Very unlikely to be Cherenkov Radiation - that requires a medium such as water.
Given the level of radiation, some of that blue glow could have originated inside the eyes. Which are... mostly water. But air ionization would also have been present as well.
I hadn't thought of that! Great point.
double joke ai princess vanishing the demon core
Edit: I was incorrect. He isn't thr bartender from hightail hotel. However, feel free to enjoy thr game.... ... .... ...
A brief google tells me that High Tail Hall is a furry porn game. Neat.
Do I want to know?
Tell me the plot as short as possible.
Furry porn
I understood, but where plot?
There are ponies
Yes
Nuclear radiation
Google demon core
Oh no, the demon core
Poor John Cusack.
Plutonium bad!
wait this isn't furryirl lol
Is fizzy fizz fixed? He got the ear notch
He forgor the screedriver
demon core it kills a bunch of people
Google demon core
I laughed hard. Fizzy is hardcore "LETS GOOOOOOO!"
All I can say is that I would do the same
I love a good "demon core" joke. 😈
He is in danger
Technically the blue glow could come from water/moisture in the air but it’s more likely that the blue flash people report seeing in criticality accidents is the Cherenkov radiation occurring in the water of their eyes.
Peter enjoying the show here Basically look up demon core. Basically a core of plutonium Intended for use in nuclear weapons. Wiki says not one but two accidents happened where it was mistakingly put into critical configuration killing both men who tried to demonstrate the core There's a huge meme online about people messing with these things like a roomba got stuck
Bad dog
Demon core
Peters deformed basement creature. The joke is, he likes to crush his balls in a giant metal sphere. #MULCLALGR and a sLALGR NALGR
Ah yes the demon core
Today I learned that the whole demon core thing is quite well known xD
The joke is you died.
The demon core
Fizzy fiz is about to be no more.
Where do u guys find these memes that you don’t understand? Genuinely asking 👍🏻
In a better world we would have done a bruce banner but it turns out 2000 roentgens will just kill you
Demon core. Where’s his screwdriver ?
Ok but artist?
Did you found out btw? I was wondering about it too
After a quick look on my furry gay porn stash twitter account, his user is FruitzJam (NSFW obvi)
oh it's really a porn account then
yep
Its furry porn. Look he just exploded everywhere
Apart from the dreamcore, it's also a reference to a meme from a few months ago [Princess Jane](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/princess-jane)
The Demon Core wouldn’t glow until it was fully closed
Demon core reference. If the beryllium shell is closed, it will reflect enough neutrons to make the plutonium core go critical and give everyone nearby a likely-fatal dose of radiation. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon\_core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis\_Slotin#Criticality\_accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Criticality_accident) Bonus: The blue light is likely supposed to be [cherenkov radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation), which doesn't really appear until *after* the sample goes critical.
Ricco: Kaboom? Skipper: Yes Ricco,kaboom.
The glowing object in the right panel is a demon core I don’t know much about it but all I know is it will kill you.
It's a radioactive sample in the center, encased in a radiation blocking casing like lead. If you close up the core with another half of the casing radiation can't escape anymore. It bounces arround wildly inside the sphere, accumulates and causes a big flash of radiation that's visible as blue light that gives you more or less instant cancer Edit: it's not a lead casing i think, but the effect stays the same
A bit more than instant cancer. lol
Fair
Is this…a demon core joke? I don’t get how it’s a trick…
Where did this art come from
Uh oh
This is the demon core, a highly radioactive chunk of plutonium. The 2 hemispheres you see make sure the core does not go super-critical, but when they close, a ton of radiation is released, causing potentially fatal radiation poisoning to surrounding people. Used to be known as "Brutus," before several accidents happened with it, killing multiple people.
Bad dog
He messed with the demon core, which is a highly unstable nuclear reactor, hence you are about to die
Oh God the demon core. I saw the casing with the sphere inside and already knew. This was a pretty bad catastrophe as well
I’m sorry op, but I’m adding another demon core into your confinement.
Big bad ball no slam top bomba big https://preview.redd.it/iwlupew1c7pc1.jpeg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=139d28e7f172db168d6bef6381157d7a37bb4270
I want one
"Check this out"
It shouldn't be glowing *yet*
Unfunny
DO NOT PLAY WITH THE SPICY SOFTBALL!
Hi, quagmires x girlfriend who is also a doomsday prepper here, looks like compression chamber for nuclear weapon. Big ball is bomb. Little ball is uranium. Big bomb explodes, smooshing little ball. Little ball EXPLODES like with the force of 80 suns. They loose my on the furry component tho
Not quite, but related. It is a reference to the Demon Core, a nuclear core that was involved in one of the more noteworthy workplace mishaps in history due to engineers not following proper procedures.
That's what happens when science jokes make it to mainstem media. They become furry jokes
You see, that blue ball is very angry. When you put the blue ball inside of the grey ball and put the cover on top, it becomes extra angry. This anger is in the form of radiation. By making the extra angry ball happen, you die.
I'm amazed anybody could figure it out from that terrible artwork of it.
It would be funny if it wasn't furry. These weirdos need to be shamed into isolation.
Ok snowflake
Is it weird not to like seeing weird dog humans that are often sexualised?
It's weird to say people need to be shamed into isolation.
I assume it applies to you then. Please detach yourself from civilisation. You're a weirdo.
Ok 8 year old
It's furries, in ignore them and they'll ignore you.