The Demoncore

Lexi discusses the nuclear bomb called the DemonCore and how it got it's name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core#:~:text=The%20demon%20core%20was%20a,effort%20during%20World%20War%20II.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/demon-core

Episode Transcript

(00:11):
This podcast discusses true crime, whichmay tell violence, and other material intended
for a mature audience. Listener discretionis advised. It's Kayla and it's Lexi.
All right, it's Lexi Day.So what have you got? It
is my day today, And intrue me fashion, I'm covering yet another

(00:32):
nuclear accident? Another Why why arethere so many? There's more? Like
this isn't even the final one thatI that I've been, you know,
requested to cover. Like I amjust the radiation person. I don't know,
maybe getting cancer changed me in theweird way. God. Yeah,

(00:57):
yeah, So this nuclear accident wasactually part of the Manhattan Project, which
was basically US dropping nuclear bombs onNagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan during World War
Two. But this was technically aboutthe unused bomb core that it still managed
to wreak some serious havoc by beingused in experiments. So this one actually

(01:22):
has nothing to do with the powerplant. Gay, so I don't have
to be like, guys, nuclearis great, but hear about this horrible,
terrible way that it went wrong.This was this is about a unused
nuclear bomb part so it's it's gonnabe it's gonna be scary, it's gonna
be heavy. Let's jump into it. So, as many of you know,
we only dropped two bombs on Japanduring World War Two. I say

(01:48):
that's a weird sense to say,oh, we only dropped two. The
nuclear bombs were devastating. I dida huge report on high school. The
nuclear bombs were absolutely devastating to Japan. Uh. The aftermath was absolutely But
there was a third bomb basically inmanufacturing that never ended up being used because
it was set to be dropped twodays after Japan had surrendered. So nonetheless,

(02:13):
this core still managed to kill twopeople, two scientists who were attempting
to study the demon core. Bythe way, it's called the demon Core.
Did I mention that this is calledthe demon Core? Yes, you
are going to like jump out ofyour pants when you find out what it
was called before it was called thedemon Core. So this managed to kill

(02:35):
two people, and those were twophysicists attempting to study the demon cores and
making deadly mistakes in their safety protocols. So this is going to be about
the first and second demon Core incidents. So about the demon Core, let
me talk about like what this is. First and foremost, this was originally
named Rufus for god knows what reason. I don't know. That's so funny

(02:59):
to me. Yeah, they werejust calling it. They were calling it
Rufus until it melted to people todeath, and then they were like,
we should give it a different name. How about demon Core. That's like,
it sounds like my playlist. Howwe go from like NICKI Minaj to
like I don't know, Rob Zombie, Like I was just shuffling through my
I liked songs today and that wasmy experience. Yeah, so nicknamed Rufus

(03:23):
for god knows what reason. Wasa fourteen pound ball of a plutonium gallium
alloy intended to be used in anatomic bomb deployed to Japan on August seventeenth,
nineteen forty five, but it wasnever used because Japan formally surrendered two
days prior. The United States decidedto keep Rufus in a lab on American
soil and test its nuclear capabilities,particularly those involving its criticality limits. So

(03:49):
I've talked about nuclear criticality incidents beforeon previous episodes discussing nuclear incidents, But
if you're new here or need arefresher, a nuclear criticality incident is basically
when something sets off a chain reactionwhich causes them in the woo. I
don't know what happened there. Anuclear criticality incident is basically when something sets
off a chain reaction which causes thenuclear material to go from stable to releasing

(04:13):
a massive amount of nuclear radiation veryquickly. So the Demon Core was housed
in the Los Alamos National Laboratory inthe United States and physicists would perform experiments
on it. But two men wereparticularly unlucky in their research pursuits with the
core. Harry Daglian and Lewis Slotinhad their lives claimed by acute radiation poisoning

(04:34):
from the core. Get this.Before these incidents, we used to do
experiments on highly radioactive material like this. By hand, I mean a lot
of prize, me like radiation techniciansleave the room when doing X rays.
And these people were just like practicallyplaying dodgeball with the Demon Core. They're

(04:57):
untouchable at U. Both experiments weretrying to test the criticality limits of the
core, basically finding the line betweenstable and supercriticality. So already these experiments
are touchy. They're literally trying tofind out how much. Can we poke
the bear before it goes nuclear?Those were the experiments. What could possibly

(05:17):
go wrong? Turns out everything?Yeah, I feel like that kind of
dives into like that touches on likeProject Sunshine. Yeah, I remember that
one where if you guys get arefresher on that one, they were testing
the effects of strawtium and other nuclearwarfare on body parts. They're like,
oh, we've been using this.I wonder what the effects are after we've

(05:39):
already dropped all these bombs. Mmhmmm hm potest that was on fetuses mid
century. Yeah, nuclear medicine ornuclear medicine. This is not nuclear medicine.
This is nuclear warfare. But likemid century, nuclear safety protocols were
just not it. Like nuclear energyis actually an incredible green energy source,

(06:00):
and the skirting of safety protocols ledto some horrific accidents. And this one,
I can't you know, I can'tpraise the demon core. It was
meant to lay massive amounts of wasteto military and civilian targets alike. That's
awful, and it just people werejust messing with it and skirting safety protocols
while they were doing already dangerous experiments. When the safety protocols are followed the

(06:24):
picture of one of these guys workingon this. He's wearing like shorts,
flip flops, sunglasses, and likea Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned. That's the picture
I have of Lewis Slott and workingwith the Demon Core. There's just people
touching it. They're touching it likeit's nothing. I know. I'm gonna
have to send you the one articlethat I'm using as my primary source for
this. It has one picture throughoutthat Lewis Lattin is just just hanging out,

(06:46):
just looking like a very cool dudemessing with the Demon Core. I
guess there was no Alara back then. Probably not like there was. Alara
is as low as reasonably achievable forthose who don't know, like if you
don't take X rays for a living, But yeah, there probably wasn't.
I feel like back then that therewas just no rules applied to anybody,
right, honest to God, youcould just do whatever. Osha be damned.

(07:12):
So actually I'm gonna have to lookinto when OSHA was founded. This
might be pre Osha, I don'tknow. So the Core was known to
be incredibly dangerous as again, letme reiteriate this. It was supposed to
go into a nuclear bomb, anda physicist named Richard Faman compared experimenting with
the core to tickling the tail ofa sleeping dragon. So the first deadly

(07:35):
criticality incident occurred on August twenty first, nineteen forty five, roughly a week
after Japan's surrender. Harry Daglian,a physicist at the Los Alamos Laboratory,
decided to skirt safety protocols one dayfor an experiment to test the criticality limits
at the core. Daglian had decidedto enter the lab by himself, with
only a security guard to accompany him. Daglian's experiment consisted of stacking tongusten carbid

(07:58):
bricks around the core to increase thecriticality by reflecting the neurons shedding from the
core. Basically, nuclear material isalways sort of shedding neurons, and what
the tungsten carbid bricks were doing werebouncing the neurons back and forth between the
core and sort of the aura thatit had around it, basically making it
less stable, more and more radiactive, reaching it closer to that point of

(08:18):
criticality where it releases the large amountof radiation if they really were just poking
a bear was like a needle.Yeah, yeah, honestly, truly,
not even like a not even likea hibernating one, just a regular bear.
Yeah, like cocaine bear, cocainebear, yes, yes, and
offering it more cocaine. So,once Daglian had gotten to the core to

(08:39):
the brink of supercriticality, he beganslowly removing the tungsten carbid bricks, and
this would have been the end ofthe experiment. But during the process of
manually removing the bricks, Daglian droppedone of them directly onto the core,
causing a nuclear criticality event to unleasha lethal amount of radiation into him.

(09:01):
Like, I know that's how superheroesare sometimes made, but I feel like
that's not what happened to him.I feel like he did not become the
Hulk. No, he very muchdid not. So traditional context manual like
physical compression of the nuclear core isthe primary mechanism for detonation of atomic bombs,
and he dropped a brick on it. So dropping a heavy brick onto

(09:22):
the core when it was already soclose to criticality meant that Daglian effectively nuked
himself when the core released roughly onethousand rats of radiation into his body.
That's terrible. Yeah, Daglion suffereda severely burned hand, very severely burned
and blistered, which was closest tothe core during this event, and then

(09:45):
over the course of the following twentyfive days, he succumbed to nausea,
abdominal pain, body aches, andthen eventually coma and death. Daglian was
only twenty four when he died.I mean that is a green science,
Like, that is so green.You must have been what like probably still
working on your PhD at that point, like right out of school. Yeah.

(10:07):
Like, but I feel like evenat that point, like you know
what it does, you know whatyou're playing with. I feel like this
is one of those you know,play stupid games, win stupid prizes,
but unfortunately, like the prize youwon, I don't know, you know
what I mean? You know whatI was saying to my fiance last night
that I've I've covered so many ofthese episodes where I talk about nuclear disaster,

(10:31):
and pretty much every single one wasjust caused by dudes completely ignoring multiple
safety regulations like at every single episode. Guys, please, Osha is your
friend, especially if you work withlike nuclear anything, energy, medicine,

(10:52):
rad onc Please don't poke the bear, Please wear your ppe, Please utilize
a lara. I don't want totalk about you in a new episode.
So, in spite of the negligencethat caused the first incident with Rufus,
the Demon Core tragedy stuck again ninemonths later, when a Canadian physicist named
Lewis Slotin was studying the core whilemaking the same crucial mistakes Daglion had made,

(11:16):
skirting safety regulations and testing the limitsof the core's criticality. It seems
obvious in hindsight, like I couldn'tget wider. As you're speaking. My
eyes was like popping out of myhead, Like you've got to be getting
made. I can vouch for this. I know we don't have video podcast
yet, but I can vouch forthis. Kalo looks so pained. So

(11:43):
instead of tongusten carbied bricks, Slotinwas using a beryllium half dome to cover
the core to push it closer tosupercriticality. Same thing, surrounding the core
with something that the neurons can bounceoff of neutrons. Sorry, I'm used
to medicine, so my brain,I'm like neurons, Nope, neutrons,
subpotomic particles. So cala. I'mso sorry for what the sentence is about

(12:07):
to do, using only a flatheadscrewdriver partially twisted by hand to ensure the
dome never fully clothed. I justit's not funny, ha ha. But
it's like, what were you thinking. Yeah, but you're a scientist,
you know what this stuff does,and you're just like you said what it

(12:31):
did to the last guy. I'mjust gonna take a little screwdriver. I'm
just this is my little hobby.Yeah, this will be fine. Just
hold let me just bob the builderit so. Slotin had been warned multiple
times about this method before due tohow unsafe it was, and one of
his colleagues even stating that he wouldbe quote dead within the year unquote if

(12:52):
he continued conducting experiments in that manner. They were correct. They were unfortunately
very correct. So on May twentyfirst, nineteen forty six, the screwdriver
slipped out of Slotin's hand and coveredthe core completely, resulting in a criticality
event. As the neutrons bounced aroundthe dome. There was a flash of
blue light and heat in the roomas the demon core blasted Slotin in his

(13:15):
team with radiation. Slotin acted quicklyby removing the beryllium cover from the core
in less than a second, buthe had seen what happened to Daglian and
knew what his fate would be.Quote, well that does it? Unquote,
Slatin was reportedly heard saying by acolleague with him in the lab,
understanding and accepting his fate obeans heI mean truly radiated myself and my whole

(13:39):
team. I'm sure he probably saidit much more somber than how I repeated
it. But that was really it. That was what they said. Is
he in that split second that hesaw that blue flash, he knew exactly
what happened and exactly what would happento him. He knew he was done
for He just didn't He just didn'tknow. You know, had stone was

(14:00):
half engraved. Knew it was done, just didn't know the date. Oh
my gosh. Just so no onesues me. That's kind of a fall
up way lyric. Sorry, it'sjust applicable in the scenario. The lyric
is the lyric is uh, oh, shoot, what is it? Why
don't know know the full lyric?This is embarrassing. I know, like

(14:20):
every Fall up Way album cover tocover, the headstones were half engraved.
They knew it was over, theyjust didn't know the date. And that's
exactly what this scenario is is Slotinknew it was over for him, he
just didn't quite know when. Andthe worst part is he knew what he
was going to have to go throughand it's horrendous. Radiation sickness is horrific.

(14:43):
And again, like it's not likeit's a surprise to him, like
he knows what he was doing,and he was warned against it by colleagues
and higher ups like Famine himself aswell, was like, you are poking
a bear. You need to dothis in a safer, more hands off
method. And it's like the wholeexperiment itself is like what can we do

(15:03):
to make this explode? And you'redoing things to make it explode, and
then when it explodes, you justgo, oh, now it exploded like
that, I don't get it.Yep. So while there were seven other
workers in the lab that were alsoexposed to radiation, they were significantly farther
away from the core, and theone who was closest to Slotin was actually

(15:24):
behind him, so was shielded primarilyby his body. So that is something
that is big in Alara too,is a physical barrier. So having someone
in front of you when something likethat happens actually drastically, drastically reduces the
amount of radiation you receive, evenif you are almost the same distance away.

(15:46):
So basically, because that person wasbehind Slotin and not next to him,
their life was spared. None ofthe other seven received a fatal dose
and recovered with relatively minor injuries.That's lucky. Yeah. So Slotin's hand

(16:06):
turned blue and blistered, very similarto Daglians, and he then suffered from
pan sitdepenia, which is a lowamount of all blood cells, not just
your red blood cells but also yourwhite blood cells and your platelets, nausea
and abdominal pain, internal radiation burns, cognitive deficits, and eventually death at

(16:30):
just nine days following his exposure.Sloughtan was only thirty five when he died,
and he actually died in the sameexact hospital room that Daglian passed nine
months prior. That's a misfortune.Yeah. So following these two deaths,

(16:51):
Rufus was nicknamed demon Core, whichI think is more fitting. Maybe if
something can like kill you because youdrop a brick on it, you should
not be calling it a cute goldenretriever name. Yeah. I mean,
I feel like if it was maybenamed demon Core in the beginning, they
probably wouldn't mess with it as much. I'm probably wrong, right, Yeah,

(17:12):
we can hope. So the goodnews is what came out of this
is this would forever change the waythat nuclear research was done. So this
means that hands on experiments like theone these two were doing completely done for
no longer a thing. All nuclearexperiments from here and out are done with
much more safety regulations in place.They're all very hands off, with much

(17:34):
more ppe, much more barriers,and basically they're all done remotely with a
you know, bug out plan inplace. Good. Yeah, yeah,
it's better. Better ideas what happenedto the demon Core? Where is she?
Where is she now? What isshe up to? So there were
experiments done Epikinia Toll to further testnuclear weaponry after World War Two, and

(18:02):
originally demon Core was meant to bedropped in experiments at Bikinia Toll and the
Marshall Islands, but it did notmake it there because the core needed time
to effectively like cool down, likecome down from its criticality after the experiments,
and so when the tests at BikiniaToll were canceled, the Demon Corps

(18:25):
was not dropped there either. Sonot dropped in Japan, not dropped in
the Marshall Islands, and so itwas just melted down to be used in
the US nuclear stockpile, and soit just remains unused. It's just hanging
out. It's still there. That'sunsettling to think about. Actually, yeah,

(18:45):
yeah, I still think one ofmy favorites were speculations that the Demon
Core was cursed. I think itwas the heart of a nuclear bomb that
people were just poking with their hands. I don't really think it was cursed.
I just think that was a terribleidea. It's not cursed. It's
just people weren't thinking exactly exactly.I don't know that. Yeah, And

(19:15):
those are the incidents I have foryou on the Demon Core aka Rufus.
I just I just see the wholething's assinine, Like I just can't I
can't wrap my brain around the factthat this happened. Like, you know,

(19:36):
it's like here, here's here's agrenade. If you pull out the
tab, it's gonna blow up.And they're like, okay, but what
happens if I pull out the tab? Yeah, they pull out the tab.
That is a very I will saythat is a very like scientist thing
to do, having having worked withsome you know, in my in my
life and known some, but yeah, this was this was absolutely dreadful.

(19:56):
I mean the amount of safety regulationsthat were just completely ignore. You know,
more should have been in place inthe first place, but so many
of them were ignored. These experimentswere so so, so dangerous to begin
with. I mean, they werereally playing with fire, and it's just
upsetting that a tragedy of that scalehad to happen for things to change.
And I feel like I say thatevery single time I covered a nuclear disaster

(20:18):
episode, I'm like, well,after this, things got a lot better.
But there was like a good coupleof decades where there was just no
rules on nuclear anything and things werenot great. And now things are much
better, I promise, guys.And we just know that, you know,
rufus is hanging out somewhere, waitingtime to shine, just hanging out.

(20:41):
I hope she never gets it thatimplies that we have to nuke someone,
and I hope that never happens everagain, anywhere in the world ever,
because again I did a huge reporton that in high school and that
changed me as a person. Thatis the most horrific thing I have ever
read in my life. Where theaftermath of the atomic body m yeah,

(21:03):
maybe I'll do an episode on that. I don't know. Nuclear is my
thing. Apparently got to rename thepodcast Welcome to Conspiracies and Nuclear Accidents.
We're your hosts. Conspiracy yeah,I like that. Conspiracy Kayla, and
nuclear accident LEXI. You know thatone doesn't work as well as conspiracy Kayla.

(21:29):
Nuclear whoopsies. Like the next episodeyou're gonna cover is gonna be like,
this is the location of all thenikes in the world and why we
shouldn't touch them, right, don'tgo near them. I think maybe next
week I'm gonna cover not a nucleardisaster. Maybe I will cover something a
little bit more fun, Like,you know, I actually had an episode

(21:53):
idea come to me in a dream. I dreamt that I did an episode
on all of the things the Simpsonshas predicted so far. And you know
what, the only reason I didn'tdo that this time is I did not
have enough time to write out thatscript for the week. But you know
what, if I've got time nextweek, I think I'll bring that to
you guys. Dream Me had agreat idea with that one. We could

(22:14):
do it with a little Simpsons onthe show and it'll be fine, right
right, And that is what Ihave for you guys, if you want
more of that. That was aweird thing to say. We have our
discord where you can talk about theepisodes. You can leave us suggestions.
We are on Instagram, we areon x Twitter. I want to it's

(22:36):
Twitter. We're on Twitter. We'reon Twitter, We're on Instagram. We
are on Facebook technically, even thoughwe're having a bot problem. But really
the best place for us is probablythe web door and the discord. We
also have a Patreon and that isroughly the cost of I would say the
cost of a coffee, but withinflation, it's like the cost of half
a coffee. And you could addthree episodes bonus episodes, and you get

(23:00):
to tell us what you want forthe bonus episodes. Yeah, so just
come join us, Come join ourPatreon, join our discod We got a
new Discordion this past week. Welcome, Welcome, love that for us.
And you know that was disastrously wicked. That was ridiculously wicked. Yeah,