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Criticality accidents are divided into one of two categories: Process accidents, where controls in place to prevent any criticality are breached;; Reactor accidents, which occur due to operator errors or other unintended events (e.g., during maintenance or fuel loading) in locations intended to achieve or approach criticality, such as nuclear power plants, nuclear reactors, and nuclear ...
A re-creation of the experiment involved in the 1945 incident. The sphere of plutonium is surrounded by tungsten carbide blocks acting as neutron reflectors.. The demon core was a sphere of plutonium that was involved in two fatal radiation accidents when scientists tested it as a fissile core of an early atomic bomb.
A criticality accident occurred on December 30, 1958, at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the United States It is one of 60 known criticality events that have occurred globally outside the controlled conditions of a nuclear reactor or test; though it was the third such event that took place in 1958 after events on June 16 [1] at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge ...
Apr. 14—It's been almost 80 years since the first atomic bomb was detonated, and scientists say there's still much to learn about how nuclear devices function as they reach the point of exploding.
The pits of the first nuclear weapons were solid, with an urchin neutron initiator in their center. The Gadget and Fat Man used pits made of 6.2 kg of solid hot pressed plutonium-gallium alloy (at 400 °C and 200 MPa in steel dies – 750 °F and 29,000 psi) half-spheres of 9.2 cm (3.6 in) diameter, with a 2.5 cm (1 in) internal cavity for the initiator.
A criticality accident (also sometimes referred to as an "excursion" or "power excursion") occurs when a nuclear chain reaction is accidentally allowed to occur in fissile material, such as enriched uranium or plutonium. The Chernobyl accident is not universally regarded an example of a criticality accident, because it occurred in an operating ...
Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy contamination in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons. A ...
The plutonium, dissolved in an organic solvent, flowed into the center of the vortex. Due to a procedural error, the mixture contained 3.27 kg of plutonium, which reached criticality for about 200 microseconds. Kelley received 3,900 to 4,900 rad (36.385 to 45.715 Sv) according to later estimates.