Tickling the Dragon’s Tail: The Plutonium Core That Killed Two Physicists
At Los Alamos there was a sphere of plutonium-239 that killed two men in nine months. Afterward, they called it the Demon Core. The first accident: 21 August 1945. Physicist Harry K. Daghlian Jr. was working alone at night, stacking tungsten carbide bricks around the core to build a neutron reflector. Reflect enough neutrons back […]