

Critical mass: how nuclear weapons work - danso
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/04/10/critical-mass/

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omgitstom
Cool article. Reading up on history of this stuff, this was a problem that was
hard to understand even in the 40-50s. This caused a lot of issues where
people irradiated themselves by pouring the wrong stuff down the wrong drain,
or leaning over and acting as a neutron deflector at the wrong time. If you
are interested in this stuff, wikipedia has a list of criticality accidents.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident)

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cnvogel
I don't think people weren't aware of the danger involved, eve in the 40s/50s.
Especially as the experiments mentioned in the article were performed
especially to get _better_ data about the criticality state. If they had known
nothing at all the spheres would have started the chain reaction much earlier,
or not at all...

IAEA has quite a lot of reports on criticality accidents, just search their
library[ _]. It 's almost always sloppy experimenters not following their
rules to get their work done faster and "easier". So, even if I don't get to
work with fissible(?) material, it's a good lesson to learn for everyone
working with dangerous machinery.

_Most of their reading material is very good, and it's all free downloads!

