I've heard rumours about experiments gone bad at Los Alamos, but of course nobody would give details.
Some scientists gave their life to improve the weapon program.
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Good video.

As I recall my reading (and the Wiki article), though, the first uranium bomb (“Little Boy”) that was dropped on Hiroshima used a “gun” design that propelled two pieces of uranium together, not that it had a sphere of the metal that was compressed by explosives as the video states. The explosive compression method was what the Nagasaki “Fat Man” plutonium bomb used.

The last time I was in the tour of the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque there was a display set up, accompanied by a video describing what happened, when Slotin screwed up as described in the video the OP posted.

Very sobering to watch. Link

If you are in or just driving through Albuquerque you really should stop and tour. It’s fascinating.

A former boss was put on guard duty guarding a plane and atomic bomb overnight after the bomb fell out of the Bombay onto the ground after landing. There was no danger as the bomb would not have been armed but he said they had to fly in special equipment to re-load it.

It’s amazing that some of those people were so cavalier about not only their own lives but their co-workers’ as well. And we wonder where restrictive industrial safety rules came from.

In EOD school during the nuclear portion we were told those stories. Pretty interesting stuff.

For being that educated, they sure were fools. Fried fools.

Nice video, thanks for posting.

The Slotin incident was dramatized by John Cusack in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy, albeit with several altered details.

We talked about these incidents in my fundamentals of nuclear engineering class. We even had a test problem where we had to calculate the amount of radiation created from such an event where the victim experienced a blue flash and we assumed the flash was Cherenkov radiation in the water in the victim’s eyeballs. I loved that class and it was one of my favorites even though I only minored in nuclear engineering. The professor was a former nuclear weapons designer at Lawrence Livermore.

Rburg
Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known have no common sense. Can barely function in the real world.

SO bizarre, I came across this same video last night..totally unrelated to this thread or the OP.

I was part of a team that taught a class a Los Alamos in 1992. The Lab laid on a full tour with a docent who'd been there from 1943 to when we got there.

His stories left me totally convinced those people were stark raving stupid.

Take the atomic reactor powered rocket. They built one, and after proving the concept, decided it was important to see what happened if there was a catastrophic coolant failure. So off to the Nevada Test Site, whereupon they take out the coolant, fire it up, and BOOM! plutonium, uranium, and rocket bits everywhere.

I pointed out that they already knew what happened with a reactor suffered a catastrophic coolant loss. So why on Earth did they do this?

His answer was "We wanted to see what happened."

Okay.

The tour of the Hanford Reservation in Washington was even scarier.

I worked at the Nevada Test Site in the mid 60’s and at the nuclear tests in Mississippi. The LRL boys were notorious for doing stupid things. The LASL crew wasn’t any better.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
Good video.

As I recall my reading (and the Wiki article), though, the first uranium bomb (“Little Boy”) that was dropped on Hiroshima used a “gun” design that propelled two pieces of uranium together, not that it had a sphere of the metal that was compressed by explosives as the video states. The explosive compression method was what the Nagasaki “Fat Man” plutonium bomb used.

That is how I remember it. Many (many!) years ago I saw a film about the development of the atomic bomb and it followed an incident in which while working with the device an accident occurred in which a chain reaction was building up and would create a premature explosion. The man performing the task realized it in time and aborted the explosion, but in the process he was exposed to a fatal level of radiation and subsequently died. I don't remember the name of the movie, but I think it must have been in the 1950s. Presumably, it was documenting the episode with Slotin.

flashguy

Interesting watch, never heard the story before.

Sigfreund is correct, the Little Boy device was a gun-type atomic bomb. Note that the uranium "bullet" was hollow all the way through (the ultimate hollowpoint), and the target was a solid slug.

I'm going to guess Hollywierd muddies the waters on purpose. As we hear various versions, we can't be sure which is true and which is intentionally distorted. A version I read (and believed at the time) was that the 2 halves of the sphere came together and the scientist rushed in and pulled them apart with his hands. When we're ignorant any of the versions might be believable. It true, these clowns shouldn't be trusted with "inchie" firecrackers.

When you trust the media and the movie industry with these "facts", what can we really trust?

The version I've heard (and corroborated in the OP video) involves Slotin using only one screwdriver held in his right hand. He used his left hand to directly hold the outer beryllium reflector dome. When the screwdriver slipped, the dome came down flat, initiating criticality. Slotin reflexively flipped the dome off the lower shell with his left hand, but had already been closely exposed to the intense radiation burst. The other scientists were further away.

The first time I read about that, the only thing I could think of was why some moron would be doing that test with a screwdrive and not a properly designed test fixture.

“Use the proper tool for the job” is one of the Nuclear Surety rules I still remember 30 years later.