At one point during the experiment, the screwdriver slipped outward from the core, with the hemispheres closing and the core becoming supercritical. During the experiment, Slotin, as he had done a number of times before, violated the safety measures by using a screwdriver instead of shims to prevent beryllium hemispheres placed around the core from closing together, which would result in the core going critical. On May 21st, 1946, physicist Louis Slotin and seven others conducted an experiment to verify the closeness of the core to criticality. ![]() ![]() Daghlian quickly removed the brick, but received a fatal dose of radiation, dying 25 days later. On August 21st, 1945, the core produced a burst of neutron radiation after physicist Harry Daghlian dropped a tungsten carbide brick into it, causing it to go supercritical. In 1946, the core was melted down, with the material used to create other cores. The demon core, known as "Rufus" before the incidents, was a spherical 6.2-kilogram subcritical mass of plutonium 3.5 inches (89 millimeters) in diameter that was used in experiments at Los Alamos Laboratory as a part of the Manhattan Project in 19 and originally intended to be used in nuclear tests in 1946.
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