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To: SeekAndFind

Nope.

And most people don’t know that the Manhattan Project scientists didn’t know anything about fallout and radiation effects either. They thought it was just a massive bomb. The first scientist, Harry Daghlian, that died from radiation poisoning died in September 1945.


38 posted on 08/08/2020 10:27:20 AM PDT by struggle
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To: struggle

The core plutonium accidentally went critical.... glowed blue and cooked this brilliant physicist. Massive doses of radiation, when, in order to stop the criticality of the core plutonium, Daghlian could not knock a tungsten carbide brick away— and had to dismantle the bricks by hand. Cannot imagine how horrifying that was.He certainly suffered a horrible end, including in the last stages— pericardial fluid around his heart making him unable to circulate blood well (without a doctor stabbing with a large hypodermic needle to draw off the fluid built up).

God Bless this brave man’s memory.

Daghlian’s father was a survivor/escapee of the Armenian Genocide by the Turks. To have his son die in the defense of freedom.


104 posted on 08/08/2020 12:14:46 PM PDT by John S Mosby (Sic Semper Tyrannis)
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To: struggle

He may have been aware of some of the effects but he acted to prevent an explosion from happening

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian

Criticality accident

The sphere of plutonium surrounded by neutron-reflecting tungsten carbide blocks in a re-enactment of Daghlian’s 1945 experiment[5]
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 critical region of neutronic behavior. This resulted in a criticality accident.[5]

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.[6]

Daghlian was estimated to have received a dose of 510 rem (5.1 Sv) of neutron radiation, from a yield of 1016 fissions.[5] Despite intensive medical care, he developed symptoms of severe radiation poisoning and his mother and sister were flown out to care for him (his father had died in 1943).[2] He fell into a coma, and died 25 days after the accident.[6] He was the first known fatality caused by a criticality accident. His body was returned to New London, where he was buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery.[7]


115 posted on 08/08/2020 1:46:24 PM PDT by a fool in paradise (Joe Biden- "First thing I'd do is repeal those Trump tax cuts." (May 4th, 2019))
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