I’ve been binge watching YouTube about nuclear criticality events, and I get the basic principle that you have two radioactive items and they come in contact long enough to create an event.
But I am not quite getting it. So for example, I watched a video about the demon core, but I am not sure how the shims were preventing criticality.
Thank you.
In: Physics
Some atoms are so big that little parts accidently shoot off sometimes. Sometimes that happens randomly and sometimes it happens because something crashed into it. If you put a bunch of these big fragile atoms close together sometimes something will shoot off one atom and smash into another atom and sometimes that crash will make something shoot off the second atom.
If you put a little bit of this stuff together you will get little chain reactions, one atom shoots off and hits another then it shoots off, and it happens a few times then dies away. There wasn’t enough atoms to keep it going.
Critical is when you have a big enough ball of the stuff that the little chain reactions don’t die out. There is enough stuff flying around that instead of going for a while and dying out the chain reaction gets bigger and bigger.
The demon core was exactly enough stuff so if it was together would start that chain reaction and not stop until it exploded in a nuclear bomb. if you put even a tiny space between the two halfs it would be just barely not enough and the chain reactions would happen and stop real quick over and over forever, the tiny gap was enough to never quite make it
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