I have read lot of documents about #nuclear criticality accidents. There's a fundamental fascination to the whole field of nuclear science and engineering, because in dealing with fissile materials one must now be extremely conscious of such things as the geometry of containers and the presence (or absence) of certain substances and other factors that are of comparatively negligible importance in dealing with ordinary physical materials. One must be scared of unintuitive things, in working with fissile systems, e.g. substituting one structural material for another, or sloshing a bit too much liquid around in a container. Unenriched uranyl nitrate solution looks the same as heavily enriched stuff...I could go on. It's a field that, as with professional aviation, is exceptionally unforgiving of shortcuts.

I wonder how many of the #tech geeklords who worship the power of the Atom—for, as I think most hep persons know, the nuclear bomb is surely a widely venerated proxy to God as an idol of ultimate power—get into the gritty details of those criticality accidents. They may very well do so, but only in that carefully detached way common with the geek culture, which thinks of such accidents as "Darwin's Award" moments and not as a tragic breakdown in the pretensions of human civilization.

Such accidents always have an avoidable quality...either that breaks your heart every time, or you always think of it as a grand joke, funny because it's happening to someone else, someone remote, some stooges in a news clipping.