The Demon Core Claims Slotin: Nuclear Dangers Exposed
Physicist Louis Slotin dies just nine days after receiving a lethal dose of radiation while manually adjusting the "demon core" at Los Alamos. His death exposes the extreme, uncalculated dangers of early nuclear research and forces the Manhattan Project to immediately abandon all manual criticality experiments in favor of remote-controlled mechanisms.
May 21, 1946
80 years ago
Key Figures & Places
Los Alamos National Laboratory
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Louis Slotin
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criticality incident
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demon core
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Louis Slotin
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Criticality accident
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Demon core
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Los Alamos National Laboratory
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May 30
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August 21
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Plutonium
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Acute radiation syndrome
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