Posted on 07/26/2012 8:37:22 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
Coca-Cola bottle, brush, screwdriver. Ashtray?
Helluva picture.
I like the old stool - makes it seem so more amazing that the atomic era could begin way back then.
Absolutely. My memory is a tad rusty (like that stool!) but I believe I read somewhere that the accidents these guys had at Los Alamos were more related to the neutron reflectors than the actual masses of the fissile material itself. Still, playing around with that stuff on such a crude basis (with screwdrivers?) probably would have resulted in mishaps in any event.
It was a movie. Fat Man and Little Boy.
I read that too. It was fascinating. I did a LOT of reading up on radiation after the earthquake hit us and the tsunami took out Fukushima.
Every detail is misleading ~ they were keeping it secret ~ but ‘splaining why you could turn into a slow cooked crispy critter!
That stool is stashed somewhere as radioactive waste!
That looks a little bigger than 23 kilotons
Almost certainly an ashtray. Much, much higher percentage of the population smoked back then, and it was accommodated everywhere. Look at pics from Mission Control during space shots in the 60s. There are ashtrays at those consoles all the engineers are sitting at.
Here’s a good shot where you can see a big glass ashtray:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/353902main_S65-28266.jpg
That reminds me of the smoke column from the Cerro Grande fire in Los Alamos back in the spring of 2000. It resembled a mushroom cloud - we could see it from the ABQ metro area.
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