"only four milliseconds"

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/berrios1/ > On December 21, 1960, the reactor was shut down for scheduled maintenance, and the primary crew of operators left for the holidays. In the meantime, a maintenance crew of three operators took over at the facility. On January 3 at 9:01pm, as the reactor was being prepared to come back online, procedures required that the central control rod be manually withdrawn by a matter of inches. Specifically, the safe limit of extension was to be reached at 4.2 inches. However, the rod was instead extended approximately 20 inches. Since the control rods regulate the rate of the fission reaction by absorbing excess neutrons released by the U-235 atoms (with 2.4 released per atom on average) and maintaining a steady rate of neutrons allowed to cause new fission events (i.e. an effective neutron multiplication factor, or k-effective, of 1), the removal of the central rod past its safe limit caused the reactor to achieve prompt criticality. Consequently, only four milliseconds later, enough heat was generated in the surrounding water to cause it to vaporize. This released an extremely concentrated amount of steam up from the reactor, causing the entire housing (weighing 26,000 lbs.) to jump 9.1 feet vertically, and for control rods and various other pieces of the assembly to be propelled upwards with great enough force to become lodged into the ceiling. The blast immediately knocked Army Specialists John A. Byrnes (27) and Richard Leroy McKinley (22) to the floor, killing Byrnes (the reactor operator) and severely injuring McKinley (a trainee). The third man, Navy Seabee Construction Electrician First Class Richard C. Legg (26, and the shift supervisor), who had been standing atop the vessel, was himself impaled and pinned to the ceiling. While nearby crews were alerted to the emergency through an alarm system, and bravely exposed themselves to dangerous levels of radiation in an effort to help the operators, all three eventually passed, with McKinley found alive but later succumbing to his injuries.

Off topic but wtf was this show I have ptsd from their fucked up faces lmao

Glad to know that when I enter the workforce, my gruesome and untimely death will be covered with a reaction image from a children’s TV show.

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