I’ve read the Wikipedia article and watched a couple videos I’m still a bit confused
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The way nuclear fission works is you take a large, unstable element, like Plutonium and shoot a neutron at it. This causes it to split apart and release a lot of energy, and lots of other neutrons.
If there is more Plutonium near by, then those neutrons might hit that Plutonium as well and cause them to split apart and release even more energy.
If you have enough Plutonium in a confined enough space, this starts a self-sustaining chain reaction. This amount is known as the *critical mass.*
To prevent this run away chain reaction from happening you can either just not have a critical amount of Plutonium in that space, or you can separate it. Remember, it’s not just about the amount, but about having that amount in a small enough space (e.g. having enough Plutonium atoms close enough together that they’ll get hit by all those neutrons flying around).
The Demon Core was two half-spheres of Plutonium that, together, were critical, but were kept physically apart as to not be critical.
But the manner in which it was kept apart was rather haphazard, relying on people just being careful which, of course, they weren’t, and there were several causes of the two halves touching or coming close enough to make the entire thing critical, temporarily starting a chain reaction, which produces a lot of radiation.
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