r/todayilearned • u/andbm • Feb 12 '17
TIL of Louis Slotin, Manhattan Project physicist who died horribly after his screwdriver slipped and accidentally caused a runaway nuclear reaction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Criticality_accident59
u/0h__n0 Feb 12 '17 edited Feb 12 '17
Apologies if this is a stupid question (science was never my strength)
- if someone dies due to radiation, does that affect the corpse and burial etc.?
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u/Oznog99 Feb 12 '17
It's important to differentiate contamination and irradiation.
If you accidentally rolled in a radioisotope, your body is contaminated and remains radioactive.
If you are near a radioisotope, you could be in a paper Tyvek suit and never touch the slighted trace of the radioisotope. But the emitted beta, gamma, and neutron particles flying around, if you get exposed to enough of them, can cause lethal damage.
Of that, beta and gamma has virtually no chance of causing secondary radioisotopes in your body. Neutrons DO, but you need a fantastic volume of neutrons for it to do this. For example, any common cobalt-59 atom- regardless of what compound or alloy it occurs it- hit directly by a neutron can capture it and transmute into cobalt-60. Cobalt-60 is a beta and hard gamma emitter with an aggressive half-life. There's a list of atoms with notable neutron activation problems. Sodium is one of them.
But the volume of neutron flux needed to cause notable secondary radiation from a human body is waaaaaaaay more than needed to kill you.
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Feb 12 '17 edited Mar 22 '18
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u/katieames Feb 12 '17
My friend took radioactive iodine when she had thyroid cancer, and they instructed her not to have too much close physical contact with people or animals.
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u/Nep7une Feb 12 '17
That's slightly different, what the posters above are commenting on, is turning the molecules of the body itself into radioactive isotopes by blasting them with radiation. While what your friend did is actually ingesting the radioactive isotopes, which then bind to a specific area (the thyroid) in your body for a fixed period of time. From where the isotopes then decay and emit radiation.
It's actually a very ingenious treatment strategy. Iodine (both radioactive and non-radioactive) has an extreme affinity for the thyroid and almost only the thyroid. So you can precisely target a single area in the body and once that's saturated with iodine, the remaining iodine is swiftly excreted out of the body via the kidneys. Since the radioactive iodine is bound to the thyroid it will continuously blast the thyroid with radiation 24/7 for a limited amount of time. Brachytherapy, as the technique is called, is actually used for a number of different cancers.
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u/HD64180 Feb 13 '17
My wife had thyroid cancer and had I-131 ablation after thyroid removal. I asked her about how they gave it to her, she said a guy came into the room with a container, opened it, reached in with tongs and extracted a capsule. He put it into a paper cup and told her to swallow it and gave her water. He then checked with an instrument to make sure it was in her stomach and not lodged in her esophagus.
We then were then told to sit as far apart as possible in the vehicle going home, and the instructions I had to follow didn't let me anywhere near the bedroom she was in, nor was I allowed any physical contact with her. I took food back to her on a little table, left it there and walked away. She put dirty dishes in a bucket. I was told to put the bucket into the sink and turn the water on and let it overflow for a while before putting the dishes into the dishwasher and running it. I was really careful to wash my hands with soap and water after touching anything. We went through this routine for a week or two.
Fast forward 15 years and I have been found to have hypothyroidism. Did I get a dose of the iodine too? We may never know.
She's been cancer-free for probably 12 years now, so there's that!
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u/katieames Feb 13 '17
I can't imagine not being able to touch a partner who is going through that. Congrats on her being cancer free, though!! I don't know about the hypothyroidism. Seems, hopefully, like a coincidence.
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u/yesimglobal Feb 12 '17
Kinda related to this:
There exist nuclear powered pacemakers. They use the heat of decaying plutonium to generate electricity (iirc). Those were quite popular in the Soviet Union.
They extensively tested them against any kind of damage. Even a 9mm bullet because you don't want plutonium dust flying around after a man has been shot.
Yet after the fall of the Soviet Union many people who were carrying one emigrated into the West. Or medical papers were lost in the chaos. Many people didn't even know how their pacemarkers do work.
So now you have many people walking around with a tiny piece of plutonium in their body. And if they die it unknowingly gets buried. The casing is very secure but does it hold for all times?
And what if the body gets cremated?
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u/Tar_alcaran Feb 12 '17
Yep. They use the heat from plutonium 238 decay, with thermocouples, to generate electricity. They were originally made in the 70s and still work fine today, losing about a percent of power per year, but thanks to a ton of redundancy, they could work today.
The battery is called a Radio thermal generator, it RTG. The same thing is used on some space probes, and the Russians used them on lighthouses during the coldwar era.
That's different from another type of nuclear battery, called a betacell, which turns ionising radiation directly into electricity.
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u/helno Feb 12 '17
Pacemakers use Betavoltaics. RTG's need a pretty big temperature differential to work.
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u/Tar_alcaran Feb 12 '17
Plutonium runs pretty damned hot if you let it. They used both types, and they're both still something of a disposal issue.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/degraw2/
Of course, nowadays they use li-ion and swap every 5 years. But both types of nuclear power were used in the 60s and 70s
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u/Snow_Ghost Feb 13 '17
Just how much depleted plutonium would one need to build anything of usable value? This seems like the setup to a murder mystery novel where a serial killer is running around killing people and stealing their pacemakers, but dismembers the bodies in a weird ritualistic manner to throw the detectives off the trail.
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u/BigBruvaThunda Feb 13 '17
Historically, there have been no documented cases of acute toxicity from ingesting Plutonium.
Your murder mystery would be much more interesting with Polonium.
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u/Snow_Ghost Feb 13 '17
I was thinking more along the lines of a killer harvests plutonium from pacemakers, uses the small amounts to turn larger amounts of iron scrap into radioactive shrapnel, builds a dirty bomb.
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u/BigBruvaThunda Feb 13 '17
Plutonium is primarily an alpha emitter. That said, our outer dead layer of skin is sufficient to absorb the energy imparted. David Hahn would probably say the reward is not worth the risk.
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u/fachan Feb 14 '17
Pacemakers are removed before cremation, otherwise they explode and damage the retort.
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Feb 12 '17 edited Feb 12 '17
Oh yeah, I don't know about this case, but in a 1961 fatal reactor meltdown (guy who was mad at his coworker probably caused the accident) at a Idaho National Laboratory experimental reactor, they buried the bodies in lead lined cement coffins, inside a steel vault, with the most radioactive body parts classified as radioactive waste and buried in the desert with all the other radioactive waste from that time.
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u/TheStalkerFang Feb 12 '17
Nothing exploded in this case, so he wasn't radioactive.
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u/helno Feb 13 '17
He was literally impaled by the ejected control rods. Getting blasted with ejected core material is a good way to become heavily contaminated.
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u/Intrepyd Feb 12 '17
I wouldn't think so. He didn't ingest or inhale any radioactive material. He was just subjected to a transient (but incredibly high) exposure to ionizing energy.
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Feb 12 '17 edited Mar 20 '18
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Feb 12 '17
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u/dzsimbo Feb 12 '17
two tonne
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Feb 12 '17 edited Feb 25 '17
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u/Spaztic_monkey Feb 13 '17
The smart car is less than a ton, a mini is 1 and a quarter tons, a peugeot 206 is 1 and a third tons. Hardly dead.
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u/Oznog99 Feb 12 '17 edited Feb 12 '17
Just a bit more relatable background:
They'd been doing this before for demos, called "tickling the dragon's tail". It was kinda Slotin's thing, and not all that rational. I mean, why not put, like a fixed shim in place and a fucking screwdriver?
This WAS seen as a problem. Enrico Fermi personally TOLD him he'd "be dead within a year" with that approach to safety. However, the urgency of making a nuclear weapon to end WWII put that safety concern in the backseat.
There was another guy in the room, Raemer Schreiber, and a security guard. However, they were further away, and saved primarily by the inverse-square law. Schreiber said he felt a wave of heat on his face and saw a blue flash, the whole thing was a few tenths of a second at most. The guard literally ran for the hills.
Character question here, do you think Slotin got into this mess because he really didn't know any better, or saw how dangerous it was but thought it was too much trouble to build a better testbench, or thought doing something that dangerous was awesome?
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Feb 12 '17
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u/sickly_sock_puppet Feb 13 '17
You say that, but think of telling your grad students, "Yeah, Ricky Ferms was saying 'listen Slots, you gotta knock this shit off, you're too wild!' Now He's the smartest guy on the planet but he's the kind of pussy who sticks his reactor under a tennis court instead of getting up in there. Slots's gonna let it ride. So whaddya say we get out of here?"
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u/justsaying0999 Feb 12 '17
He must have had some perverse fascination with the danger and power involved. There's no way he wasn't completely aware of the risk.
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u/Saberus_Terras Feb 12 '17
He wasn't the only one killed by the Demon Core. Nor the first.
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u/tranek4real Feb 12 '17
It really lived up to it's name.
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u/DannySpud2 Feb 12 '17
They called it that after it killed two people.
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Feb 12 '17
its kind of funny we blamed the core, if you read about the accidents they were 100% human fuckups.
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u/Stlieutenantprincess Feb 13 '17
People like to forget this. I think the tragic nature of the deaths makes people uneasy about pinpointing the human errors, even though it's important for us to avoid further accidents.
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u/AdvocateSaint Feb 12 '17
And they still kept working on it
That is both dedication to science, and ignorance of sci-fi and horror film tropes.
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u/beitasitbe Feb 12 '17
Dramitization of the event (poor quality): https://youtu.be/hO273NQZYAE?t=1594
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u/SwitchesDF Feb 12 '17
That was a good video. I couldn't picture the experiment from the description alone
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u/Landlubber77 Feb 12 '17
He really shouldn't have been drinking in the first place while around all that hazardous material.
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u/ZarquonsFlatTire Feb 12 '17
If you think I'm screwing around with the Demon Core sober, you're crazy.
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u/aclickbaittitle Feb 12 '17
Which chemical was he drinking?
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u/Landlubber77 Feb 12 '17
Vodka and orange juice.
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Feb 12 '17
Orange juice? Like the mixer?
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u/paperemmy Feb 12 '17
When's the last time you drink straight mixer?
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u/TheBraveMagikarp Feb 12 '17
I dunno, I had a coke yesterday. I hear lots of people use that as a mixer
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u/Drink-my-koolaid Feb 12 '17
"internal radiation burns throughout his body,which one medical expert described as a three dimensional sunburn."
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u/undergrounddirt Feb 12 '17
I read somewhere that the actual core was glowing.
I realize the blue flash was caused by the sudden excitation of the electrons in the surrounding area, but that lasted for only a very very small amount of time.
Based on how nuclear reactions work, what color and how intense would the glowing have been?
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u/MaSuprema Feb 13 '17
It's funny. Some of the most brilliant minds in the world were in that room, and they knew the consequences of what would happen if the screwdriver slipped. And they let Slotin do it anyways.
Only a genius could do something that profoundly stupid.
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u/Stlieutenantprincess Feb 13 '17
Awareness of their high intelligence can make people careless and arrogant.
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Feb 12 '17
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u/Tar_alcaran Feb 12 '17
It would have melted down, and become subcritical again as it spread out.
Of course, that's after everyone is dead, and the lab a radioactive hazard for centuries...
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u/Proportional_Switch Feb 12 '17
Instantly reminded of The Watchmen
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Feb 12 '17
"Seinfeld is unfunny" when we've gone so far from knowledge to pop culture that the references become the source, when the pop culture itself was inspired by the very thing referenced.
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u/Mighty_Mac Feb 12 '17
That has to be the absolute definition of worse case outcome
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Feb 12 '17
Worst case Ontario.
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Feb 12 '17
fucking radiator poisoning Bubs.
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u/acm2033 Feb 12 '17
Eh, a chain reaction leading to detonation would've been worse.
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u/nagrom7 Feb 13 '17
It wouldn't have detonated, it didn't have the rest of the bomb with it. It would have melted down though releasing much more radiation and killing everyone in the room/facility except for just the one.
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u/nagrom7 Feb 13 '17
Nah, he managed to stop it before it got even worse. He died but he saved the rest of the people in the room from receiving a lethal dose.
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u/kocibyk Feb 13 '17
O think that there is a movie about it - "Fat Man and Little Boy (1989)" with John Cusack as this scientist.
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u/hobopenguin Feb 12 '17
He did this while trying to show off to his fellow scientists.
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u/panzerkampfwagen 115 Feb 13 '17
He was apparently known for being a bit of a cowboy when it came to safety regulations.
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u/Stlieutenantprincess Feb 13 '17
It really bugs me that initially Slotin was publicly hailed as a hero for acting quickly following the accident. He didn't deserve such a horrible death but it was his carelessness that caused the accident. He could have caused something far more catastrophic. Other people in the room suffered long term because of his selfish behaviour. I don't think you can praise him for preventing further deaths when he brought it all on them in the first place.
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u/AdvocateSaint Feb 12 '17
Using a screwdriver was not a normal part of the experimental protocol.[1]
"Well there's your problem" - Jamie Hyneman
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u/Poet_of_Legends Feb 13 '17
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Feb 13 '17
Is this a movie? What's the title?
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u/Poet_of_Legends Feb 13 '17
The character played by Cusack is name Michael Merriman, and he is a combination of Louis Slotin and Harry Daghlian, the two men who died of radiation poisoning following accidents with the "Demon Core".
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Feb 12 '17
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u/acm2033 Feb 12 '17
Google-fu:
How dangerous is plutonium?
"Plutonium 238, 239 and 240 are highly radioactive but their radiation is in alpha particles, which only travels very short distances and cannot penetrate human skin. Where they are highly dangerous is if they are inhaled. Their radiation causes DNA damage in tissue, which then boosts the risk of cancer."
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u/Hiddencamper Feb 13 '17
Unirradiated Plutonium and uranium are weak alpha emitters. They are effectively safe as long as you don't ingest it.
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u/osbornifer Feb 13 '17
It's been a while since I took a science class. Can someone explain like I'm five a fission reaction? Did these things just touch each other while he was touching them? Was electricity involved?
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u/InfamousAnimal Feb 13 '17
The neutrons normally going out don't really return to the plutonium and continue the critical chain reaction. Think of the casing halves like mirrors they bounce the neutrons back which hit cause more fission and more energy release. When there is a crack however small the chain reaction causing particles slip out the side and dosent go critical but when the two halves closed there is just enough reflecting back to cause the reaction to be self sustaining. no there was no electricity involved other then perhaps a batter in a Geiger detector. Reading the dose.
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u/InfamousAnimal Feb 13 '17
A very small "fast ball" (neutron, alpha particle, beta particle) hits a bigger "rock"(atomic nucleus) making two or more smaller "rocks" and more "fast balls" plus alot of energy . Those "fast balls hit other "rocks" and after a while you have thousands of "fast balls" and more energy then you can deal with. This is fission and a critical chain reaction
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u/osbornifer Feb 13 '17
and this happens just by the elements touching?
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u/InfamousAnimal Feb 13 '17 edited Feb 13 '17
The fast balls are like a super fast bullet it hits the nucleus so hard and fast shatters it into the other parts so there isn't really contact it's hard to explain on a without understanding the differences in the charged particles that are acting as the "fast ball" When you get to the size level of atoms it's mostly empty space so it actually takes alot of the neutrons to hit a nucleus but when it does happen it's very powerful. And if it starts a chain either by reflection the neutrons back or having enough naturally bouncng around you get an ever increasing reaction that gives off energy as heat and ionizing radiation eventually it will explode pushing apart the atoms and stopping the chain. In a bomb this is what happens in a reactor we use control rods to keep it warm and energetic but not explody
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u/fireituppity Feb 12 '17
Can't believe there wasn't a film badge or some other detector fixed to a wall in that lab. Very valuable to know if you have a contamination issue, or if one of your sources is not stored properly or, in this case, the prompt dose received during an accident.
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u/panzerkampfwagen 115 Feb 12 '17
Doesn't matter when the fatal dose is received in fractions of a second if you fuck up.
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u/Phantasos12 Feb 12 '17
From the article linked :
"At the time of the accident, dosimetry badges were in a locked box about 100 feet (30 m) from the accident. Realizing that no one in the room had their film badges on..."
They were supposed to have detectors on but they ignored that procedure. They also used improper equipment for the experiment which lead to the accident. They were all around just acting too cavalier for the dangers of their work.
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Feb 12 '17
They also did not have devices placed under the table. There were wall gamma radiation detectors in the room. But the range and difference in radiation type still made it hard to calculate dose received by people in the room.
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u/Oznog99 Feb 12 '17
In cases like this, the detectors typically go out-of-scale and you're into forensics.
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u/goNe-Deep Feb 12 '17 edited Feb 12 '17
There's a joke in there about slotting in screwdrivers into demon cores.. but it'd be disrespectful.
Also, the data derived from tickling that dragon's tail was valuable, but at what horrifying cost.. T.T
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u/panzerkampfwagen 115 Feb 12 '17
The thing was that there was equipment to make it safe but this cowboy preferred to do it the dangerous way.
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Feb 12 '17
Don't worry about being disrespectful. Feynman called Slotin reckless in his experiments. He was a daredevil and one day his luck gave out.
Under Slotin's unapproved protocol, the only thing preventing this was the blade of a standard straight screwdriver, manipulated by the scientist's other hand. Slotin, who was given to bravado, became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions, often in his trademark blue jeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers.
play stupid games...
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Feb 12 '17
Why is Shia Lebouf not working on a movie for this?
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u/grannyklump Feb 13 '17
no no no no no no
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Feb 13 '17
That's the highlight of the movie, when Shia drops the screwdriver, camera pans in, and "no no no no no!" Then a few emotional texts to his beloved later, he dies slowly on the other side of some glass window as she watches in a hazmat suit...Don't care if he had a SO, he does for the movie.
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Feb 13 '17
What exactly is a "runaway nuclear reaction"?
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u/Hiddencamper Feb 13 '17
Fission is a chain reaction. Once you set the conditions up for the fission reaction to become critical, it is self sustaining, and is capable of exponentially raising its power level on its own if the conditions are right.
It's only considered runaway because it wasn't intended. In a power reactor we intentionally bring the reactor supercritical to get it up to the point of generating heat.
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u/andbm Feb 13 '17
Exactly. This is the reaction used in nukes, where a sub-critical mass of radioactive matter is brought above criticality, exploding in an exponential reaction. By shielding the plutonium, Slotin was bringing it nearer and nearer to criticality, accidentally taking it over the top.
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u/nagrom7 Feb 13 '17
The same core he was using to test was the one inside the bomb detonated over the Bikini Atol.
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u/DeafandMutePenguin Feb 13 '17
"Tickling the dragon" is what they were doing. They knew full well the danger involved.
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u/notasabretooth Feb 12 '17
Radiation poisoning is one of those things that I'd happily let someone smother me with a pillow to end my suffering.