History of Armenia 39: Harry Daghlian and the Demon Core
Joe and Ani discuss the strange history of an Armenian-American prodigy, early nuclear physicist, and guy who died because of nearly causing a nuclear explosion in a lab during the last days of the Manhattan Project. That's right: we're discussing Harry Daghlian.
Comments (30)
"neurons"
Ani has the best voice. I could listen to her all day.
I love the episodes with Ani!! More Ani!!!
Armenian immigration process sounds a lot like the Israeli one
“Anora” sounds like the Armenian equivalent to “La Grande Belleza”, particularly in how some critics responded to it.
Soviet kids got powdered passion fruit drink? Damn, now I'm jealous
as someone who (I think) experienced what Ani is talking about, it's more like "drink that tastes like a random mix of the elements of the periodic table plus sugar". But it tastes exactly like a passion fruit, if you're 10 and have no idea what a passion fruit is
I need a story about one of Armenia's famous woman guys.
As for what exactly happened with the incident itself: enriched plutonium (the kind they make atomic cores out of) passively emits neutrons (radiating neutrons are also called alpha radiation) -- being enriched is not the normal state of plutonium, and it's trying to shed excess energy in the form of radiation in order to return to a lower-energy state. The Tungsten Carbide bricks serve to reflect the neutrons, causing them to bounce around and back into the core, causing the Core to release more neutrons. The more neutrons are bouncing back into the core, the more of that stored energy the core can release at once, and since releasing energy means shooting out more neutrons, the process has a positive feedback loop. The point where that loop becomes self-sustaining (meaning you don't have to add any more bricks, the reaction will progress into releasing more and more energy all on its own) is criticality, and Prompt Criticality is when neutrons released directly by a fission source (in this case, the Demon Core) bring something to a critical state, rather than having secondary products that then decay into neutrons - in other words, the Core is only limited in how fast the reaction can escalate by how many neutrons it can vomit out at one time and how long it takes those neutrons to bounce back into the core. And because the tungsten carbide brick is sitting directly on-top of the core, the neutrons don't have to travel very far at all, and enriched plutonium can emit an awful lot of neutrons (citation needed).
For an analogy, imagine you're holding down the trigger on an M249, causing the barrel to heat up until one of the rounds explodes in the barrel, and that round exploding cooked off the rest of the ammunition. The major difference would be that the bullets fired wouldn't bounce back into the gun in that situation, hopefully.
Ani has the most soothing voice I have heard.
There’s something fitting about making jokes about how a Manhattan Project today would be some AI bullshit, and then going on to mispronounce neutrons as “neurons”. Imagine if you could just enclose a computer in a beryllium sphere and it’d go prompt GPT. Or drop a tungsten carbide brick on it and it’ll start spewing AI pictures that fool boomers on Facebook
Alright, nuclear guy here. The core assembly would not have blown up but it would have gotten really hot and melted a bunch of shit and caused some...problems.
LPOTL needs to just have Joe on. He and I both want this.
Ima be real Joe...i always assumed due to how much you mention body hair i figured certifying your ethnicity would resemble my one heavy equipment jobs process...they made sure i had certs for the equipment i would be operating and did a hair test...so i reckoned they just checked your podcasting credentials and your shoulder hair density and called it good lol...what a pain in the ass
In 2021 I won 16 cases of white monster from a contest I entered finished the last one in 2023. I’ll never touch it again
16x24= a blizzard of Monster
Neutrons not neurons.
Close enough for agincourt work
I was just trying to figutre out who would have the most problems getting Armenian citizenship who would still want it , and I think I figured it out: A guy with a Azeri father and a Hemshin mother
Not to be that guy, but $27billion is honestly huge budget for a single research project. The budget of the NIH is $47billion and that is for all 12 institutions and hundreds of grants given to individual investigators. If we invested like that in research now a days it would be a lot more As another point of reference the average cost of bringing a single new drug to market is about $2billion. So that’s a dozen new drugs
By way of comparison, the new F-47 fighter has an initial project cost of $20 billion. Also, the Enola Gay was more expensive to develop than the bomb it dropped. The B-29 had a very troubled development, but was ultimately worked out. The B-29 cost $3 billion to develop, $49 billion in today's dollars.
This episode reminds me of the utter rage I felt the first time I heard Joe pronounce the word "nuclear" correctly...I had finally gotten over the mispronunciation, and i had to go to an early episode to make sure it wasnt a mandela effect thing.
Anora is streaming on Disney. That means it’s ok for my my 5 year old.
Edging a nuclear core. What could go wrong?
Love to hear Joe’s war on cars dispatches
Loved your thoughts on Anora. Was just watching it a few weeks ago and wondered what your thoughts were
Demon Core Episode???
the most prized catalytic converter
The Cat that kills you in the process.