On May 21, 1946, physicist Louis Slotin and seven other Los Alamos personnel were in a Los Alamos laboratory conducting another experiment to verify the exact point at which a subcritical mass ( core ) of fissile material could be made critical by the positioning of neutron reflectors.
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It is a great neutron source ( hit it with alpha particles and it gives you neutrons ), and is a great neutron reflector, and as such is used in nuclear weapons for these two purposes .-- talk ) 01 : 29, 1 May 2009 ( UTC)
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On the other hand, it's probably a lot easier to get plutonium, especially if you and your comrades aren't all too concerned about your personal safety during the extraction process ( from nuclear reactor spent fuel ) . ( And it would help to have " insiders " who arrange the nuclear reactor to breed more plutoniium than it might otherwise produce . ) But plutonium is only effective in an implosion-type bomb and to build one of those, you need to not only be as intelligent as your average Wikipedian but also a damned-fine machinist who can form precise bits of plutonium, high-explosives, neutron reflectors, and the like.
