The Same Chunk of Plutonium Killed Two Scientists

[00:00:00]Did you know the same chunk of plutonium killed two scientists in two separate accidents and they kept using it in between? Los Alamos, 1945. A sphere of plutonium roughly the size of a grapefruit, 6.2 kg, [music] enough fissile material to end a city.

[00:00:16]Harry Daghlian was working alone at night when he fumbled a neutron reflector onto the core. He absorbed a lethal dose [music] in seconds. He died 25 days later. Nine months passed. The same core, still in use. Louis Slotin would demonstrate it to colleagues by holding two halves of a reflector apart with a screwdriver. One screwdriver between him and a nuclear chain reaction. The screwdriver slipped.

[00:00:39]Everyone in the room saw the blue flash, Cherenkov radiation, the color of something going very wrong at the atomic level. Slotin died nine days later. Here is the part that doesn't leave you.

[00:00:49]These were brilliant men, the best physicists alive, and they had handled this object so many times that it stopped feeling like what it was. It took two bodies from the same sphere to change the procedure. Two.