Post mortems of all criticality accidents ever. The SL-1: "One of the night workers, Jack Byrnes, was dead, and McKinley was lying on the ground moaning. The third operator, Richard Legg, was nowhere to be seen.
The rescuers reconvened outside to formulate a rescue plan. They knew McKinley likely wouldn’t survive, but they had to attempt a rescue anyway. Four men ran in with a stretcher, carted McKinley to a truck and then transferred him to an ambulance. McKinley died a couple of minutes later. Not knowing exactly what to do with the highly radioactive body, the rescue team asked the ambulance driver to park the vehicle in the desert, away from the highway. There, they swaddled the body in lead blankets so that McKinley could be driven to a more secure location.
Later that night, rescuers found Legg. He had been pinned to the ceiling by a piece of metal, which had flown off the reactor during the explosion. It took several days, a highly trained team and a crane to remove Legg’s body from the silo."
Originally shared by Ed S
When chemistry suddenly (and sometimes fatally) turns into physics - a fascinating retrospective of criticality accidents:
(Sometimes the victims were woefully under-trained and sometimes the premises under-equipped. But what’s going on when three people step around the foot-thick safety wall, unbolt the big container and try to walk it across the floor to tip out the contents?)