How to die at Los Alamos
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
Criticality accidents are my favorite type of disaster. For a time I was led by a morbidly curiosity to research these incidents. Reading these, I sure am glad I picked a career that's much safer than being a nuclear scientist! Eyestrain and standing around all day is definitely preferable to a job where if you move two pieces of metal together too quickly, you might see a blue flash, feel a sensation of pins and needle sticking you in the face and mouth, start vomiting and die two days later.
The article mentions the Demon Core, definitely a classic.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
Los Alamos has put together a couple of documents describing each known incident. I find it fascinating to follow exactly how each miniature disaster occurred. It's surprising, sort of, how dangerous these materials are and it seems that certainly, one needs to take great care when reflecting neutrons.
https://www.orau.org/ptp/Library/accidents/la-13638.pdf [PDF]
and an older one...
Note the first one, where the system went critical simply because the scientist leaned too closely to it and neutrons bounced off his body. Only his alertness to some red indicator lamps and resulting quick action saved him, vs. the 1st to die of this who in theory could have taken corrective action before getting a fatal dose.
Then again past a certain point almost all of these resulted from violating rules. Note from one of his autobiographies how Feynman was prepped to really get the attention of the people running stuff at Oak Ridge I think it was if he realized they'd created a system that might result in a criticality accident.
Ah, and there's this big difference: I grew up a couple of decades earlier than us, and still have my mother's Civil Defense Block Mother sign from the late '60s. Back then the madness of MAD hadn't completely taken over and if you were interested, the government was happy to train about how to survive a nuclear war, which really isn't difficult at all if you're outside the immediate effects range.
So to me radiation is to be respected, but it's an understood and mitigateble danger. I'd rather work in this field than in a university synthetic chemistry lab (one possible direction I could have gone if $$$ hadn't prevented me from getting my undergraduate degree). Staying safe there requires tremendously more knowledge of a fantastically more complicated field, resisting too much pressure to work when you're tired, and trusting the others in the lab not to screw up too badly.
Actually, if you go to the official document, pg. 13-4, it's not that bad:
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/19...
Especially since I have high school experience with potassium chlorate, a dangerous oxidizer. E.g. I used classic chlorate and sugar plus nichrome igniter wire plus my second generation rocket launcher device (both versions having a physical key lockout, didn't trust my younger brothers) to do some neat 4th of July fireworks stuff. E.g. add a small "bomb" of chlorate and sugar to the igniter packet taped to the inside of one half of a cinderblock, then arrange a gross of bottle rockets in that, and you can get an amazing display due to the significant variations in their fuzing. Oh, BTW, this was done in the middle of our lakes ^_^. In all this I somehow never managed to burn myself.
Anyway, they mixed up their own witches brew to make the smudge pots, and looking at the ingredients it's no surprise it exploded, and now looking up smoke screen making on Wikipedia, you use either potassium chlorate or if using phosphorous, atmospheric oxygen or much tamer aluminum as oxidizers (the latter for IR proof smoke), not both. Magnesium turnings are right out.
I.e. I had a better knowledge of chemistry and safety in high school than these guys did. Reading between the lines they were clearly doing it this way to have some fun as opposed getting the job done, in an area where you almost certainly want to avoid random fires.
So, yeah, they should have been better supervised, access to these chemicals should have been better controlled (i.e. a good clerk would have raised an eyebrow if they tried to withdraw any single one of these chemicals except of course the sugar, and any of the combinations...), and critically "no disciplinary action could be taken." I agree with every one of the recommendations.
And disciplinary action was almost certainly not needed, those who were held at a degree of fault realized they'd let these "kids" kill or blind themselves.
I too share your fascination with the nuclear incidents, but I felt that the takeaway point of the article was that our fascination is entirely disproportionate. As cool as the 'demon core' is, you can just as easily die driving a bulldozer or digging a trench.
Perhaps our excitement and enthusiasm leads indirectly to the generally disproportionate fear that the general public have of anything linked to radiation or nuclear physics.
While reading the fantastic and highly recommended Washington's Crossing (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195170342/), it became implicitly clear that the rebellion would have failed if Washington hadn't been a beyond superb horseman. Imagine having to direct battles on snowy, icy nights....
Possible suicide-pact? Who in the world would mix wine with anti-freeze? Accidentally mixing such a cocktail seems fairly unlikely. Was this some sort of concoction mixed up by a researcher who was in the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" stage, which was tragically mistaken for unadulterated wine?
That doesn't always stop manufacturers. There was a big scandal in the '80s with a small Austrian wine maker using the bad kind. This was the basis for The Simpsons episode where Bart went to France as an exchange student and ended up being forced to work at a winery that was putting antifreeze in and making Bart drink it to see if they had put too much in.
And to go full circle with the topic of discussion (Los Alamos), the exchange student visiting Springfield in this episode was really a spy agent visiting to steal nuclear secrets.
Confusion between the two has been the cause of several mass poisonings involving medicine manufactured with poor quality controls.
Greed makes people forget limits. Ever heard about Jin Ling cigarettes? These originate in Kaliningrad and are smuggled throughout Europe. Funny enough, they have been faked - and authorities have found anything from dust to rat sh.t in the faked contraband cigarettes.
And that's harmless. If you want real gross stuff, look at what heroin is stretched with, or what "Krokodil" is.
So yes, anti-freeze isn't a surprising drink if better alcohol wasn't available.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_diethylene_glycol_wine_sca...
That ties into the anecdotes of Parisians shouting "Viva Le Prestone!"[1] as troops moved through their city - each Jeep had "Prestone" stenciled on the hood, partially to mark that it'd been treated with antifreeze, and partially to warn GIs against attempting to drink it.
[1] http://www.300thcombatengineersinwwii.com/summer09.html (scroll down to the notes from Warren Chancellor.)
Interesting anecdote, the carpenter died the morning after Hiroshima. Most real world cover ups are not x-files show material but tend toward "the driver was up really late at the party last night". And it is interesting given the modern puritan attitude toward drunk driving that this was the only accident where blame was assigned. I would not be surprised if the driver had been out late the night before celebrating and the foreman did not take that into account thus getting recommended for firing. Or it was the foreman who was still drunk from the night before, leading directly to the carpenters death and destruction of .gov property.