Things Glow Better With Coke

A new history of the Manhattan Project records a 1943 incident  that may alarm the professionally paranoid.

Newly minted PhD. Isabella Karle's first job at the Project's University of Chicago Met Lab was  purifying  "crude plutonium dioxide in the form of greasy yellow flakes... from Oak Ridge." Close to her laboratory door was a Coca Cola machine ,of the sort that dispensed  Coke syrup and carbonated water into wax paper cups.

"The man who came to service the machine at our lunch hour forgot to bring his hose for filling the syrup reservoir. He walked into a neighboring laboratory  and borrowed a rubber hose from an aspirator, filled the the reservoir with syrup , returned the hose and left."

The transfer of plutonium to the coke machine was detected  hours later by a thirsty  technician who happened to be carrying a geiger counter.  How many  paused to refresh themselves before him remains a mystery of the atomic age.

Comments

[Tim Worstall]

There's a story from the UK. After the first plutonium for bombs had been manufactured at a huge cost, with great security, it was then transported from Windscale to Aldermaston (reactor to bomb factory).
On an Army truck a simple Bedford, with a driver and a Corporal. No other security at all.

[Rod]

If the Coke guy indeed borrowed the hose from an aspirator, then plutonium had also gone down the drain by way of that hose.

That must have been one hot septic tank.