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"Some physicists argue that this was a preventable accident."
Yeah, seriously. The guy's been dead for nearly 75 years. There's no need to be gentle to the point of obfuscation when it's blindingly obvious that the accident was his fault, even considering that safety protocols at the time were still very lax. Harry Daghlian's death is quite a bit easier to see as a mere mistake, albeit one that he should never have been in a position to make (which is why new protocols were implemented after he died). The official narrative about Slotin is very much non-neutral, given the government's interest in not appearing reckless or unconcerned with protecting the scientists it employed. His actions following the accident may have saved lives, but he's the one who put those lives in peril in the first place. WP Ludicer (talk) 22:08, 21 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The "Radiation dosage" section of the article gives figures in rad, Roentgens, grays, rem, and Sieverts. How do these measurements relate to each other? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.255.171.122 (talk) 01:36, 15 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Check the articles on Sievert and Gray. 100 rem = 1 sv. In short; Sievert is a weighted version of Gray that takes into account how "bad" it is to receive the radiation from a medical point of view. Sievert takes into account that different parts of the body handles radiation different, and the type of radiation also matters. Gray is not weighted with medical care in mind. · · · Omnissiahs hierophant (talk) 01:04, 2 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This may not be the right place but what I'm wondering about is what specifically the early criticality experiments sought to find out.
In a "normal" quantitative science experiment, what you do is keep all parameters constant except one, which you vary in order to obtain different results. These results then make it possible to arrive at formulas or algorithms to describe the interrelations between the different parameters.
For example, a simple experiment about the electrical conductivity of liquid solutions would be to dip two electrodes into a sample solution, apply a current and measure the voltage. In a series of experiments you could then vary the distance between the electrodes, or the concentration of the solution, or the current, or the voltage etc, and even do multiple series for different electrolytes to compare those to each other, and arrive at the specific conductivity of given electrolytes.
Now it is clear that in the criticality experiments, they measured neutron flux. But the variable parameter in the Slotin experiment seems to be "the shape of the slot between the two hemispheres" but there doesn't even appear to be any measurement of some distance that would allow you to calculate that geometry. Cancun (talk) 12:12, 23 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The value of a critical mass of plutonium is difficult to sense. Not only does it hinge on the temperature of environment and other physical factors, but on the surrounding materials. The two hemispheres and the ring were designed to be "about 75% critical" when assembled. Placing them within the tamper would raise that to about 95%, but the question was, how close? They wanted to get it as close as possible so that the explosive shock, when it came, would drive the core as high into the prompt-critical range as could be arranged for before firing. Notice that both accidents involved building artificial tampers around the core.
Apparently, there is a considerable difference between having the beryllium almost all the way down, and all the way down. I'm not really clear why that is the case; it implies that the beryllium shell was carefully calibrated by previous testing to achieve just a tad better reflective results than the uranium tamper in the real bomb, so they could see how close they could push it, with the dangerous potential of pushing it too far. Unlike Fermi's control rods in the CP1 that he could move fractions of an inch and then wait 15 minutes to see how the curve formed up, they didn't have the patience for careful experimentation at this point. They developed a method and never looked back at it. SkoreKeep (talk) 06:40, 24 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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