The following is an article from the newest vo...  ...Reader. The real-life story of a small ball of plutonium , the people it killed, and the researchers who bl...  ...ng brick-shaped pieces of metal around a chunk of plutonium , the highly unstable fuel used in most nuclear bo...  ...type of fuel used in nu...

In 1945, physicist Harry Daghlian was working on a...  ...ng on a 6.2 kg (14 lb) spherical mass of plutonium at the Los Alamos laboratory. He was stacking bri...  ...ng bricks of tungsten carbide around the plutonium core when he noticed a nearby neutron co...  ...and the brick slipped...