Nuclear Engineering

Meet The Demon Core

The history of the demon core

By: Nathaniel Contreras, Journalist

March 21, 2025

Leading events

During world war 2 the Americans have found a material in which they would use to build a bomb with the material they found. The material in question is uranium which is named after the time the man discovered it (Martin Klaproth) which was in 1789 and which was 8 years after the plant Uranus had been discovered. Why they build the bombs in the first place to make Japan surrender and recently have attacked pearl harbor. To respond with their attack on Pearl Harbor they dropped the bombs on Japan on two towns called Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to fight back and as the U.S wanted Japan surrender their army after seeing the destruction of their land. After this the U.S would find new ways to experiment with other materials that had the nuclear properties like uranium. One of the experiments was a sphere made from plutonium which weights 14 pounds, And the scientists that work with this experiment called it “the Manhattan project” but some scientists have called something different besides “the Manhattan Project” instead they call it the “Demon Core”

Meet the “Demon core”

The “Demon Core” was an experiment that two scientists had experimented on and all had one goal in mind. That goal would be to make the Plutonium sphere to reach its “critical point” for the Plutonium to have weaker version of the the blast of the nuclear bombs. One of the scientists was named Harry Daghlian according to “Business Insider” Harry’s plan to make the Demon core go critical was tricky. He made a barrier made of tungsten carbide around the demon core so that the barrier can reflect the neutrons that were shooting out of the demon core back to it. Thinking of the plan he was going for (he was correct), but the reason why this plan failed was a total accident. You see he was trying to make a barrier around which also means top-to-bottom, so when trying to put a brick on top of the demon core the brick slipped from this hands and fell on to the demon core. Which caused it to make a blast of heat much like the nuclear bombs, but it was much weaker and was the size of a 600$ 5 meter New York apartment. Harry stopped it but he was unlucky since the blast unleashed a bunch of radioactivity in the air which affected him and sadly passed away because of it. According to Business Insider after his death another scientist named Louis Slotin experimented on the demon core with the same goal of making the demon core go critical. He tried to make a sphere around the core made of beryllium, while with other scientists. He had the half sphere held on by a screw driver his hand slipped and the same blue flash appeared and thankfully Slotin stopped it, but the radioactivity got to his system and later died from it but the other scientists survived.