[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by McBeck

Yes, its a little known fact. Most people remember Three Mile Island.
However, during the Manhatten project, a few people died due to a core and cover of fisile material accidential getting too close during an experiment.
They used a screwdriver to keep them appart and it slipped. (Thats how I remember it and may very well be mistaken). One quickly pushed the materials appart, but depending on how close you were, you got a certain dose. I think they called it "tickling the dragons tail"...

I think its this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin

^Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian Slotin was not the first in the incident involving the seven men in the room, in 1946, in the 'tickling the dragons tail'. The first fatality was Haroutune Krikor "Harry" Daghlian Jr. who accidentally irradiated himself fatally on August 21,1945 from the same fissile pile, "During an experiment on August 21, 1945, Daghlian was attempting to build a neutron reflector manually by stacking a set of 4.4-kilogram (9.7 lb) tungsten carbide bricks in an incremental fashion around a plutonium core. The purpose of the neutron reflector was to reduce the mass required for the plutonium core to attain criticality. He was moving the final brick over the assembly, but neutron counters alerted Daghlian to the fact that the addition of that brick would render the system supercritical. As he withdrew his hand, he inadvertently dropped the brick onto the center of the assembly. Since the assembly was nearly in the critical state, the accidental addition of that brick caused the reaction to go immediately into the prompt supercritical region of neutronic behavior. This resulted in a criticality accident. Daghlian reacted immediately after dropping the brick and attempted to knock the brick off the assembly without success. He was forced to disassemble part of the tungsten-carbide pile in order to halt the reaction." He died 25 days later: This core, subsequently nicknamed the "demon core": was later involved in the death of physicist, Louis Slotin. He died nine days after saving the others in the room...not the way to go in either case...The courage of the two physicists in preventing greater damage at their own lives' cost is remarkable.