The Demon Core and Other Criticality Accidents

The Demon Core was a sphere of plutonium-gallium alloy that the U.S. made for use in an atomic bomb during World War II. After the war, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory had two separate, fatal criticality accidents while working with it. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. My friend Adrian,
who is a science educator, asked me years ago at

(00:21):
this point whether we had ever thought about doing an
episode on the Demon Core, which sounds terrifying, and I
kept thinking it might make a good October episode because
nuclear criticality accidents can be terrifying, like they expose people
to possibly lethal doses of radiation and just a fraction

(00:41):
of a second, usually completely by surprise and before anybody
can react, and then that leads to just a horrifying
and gruesome and sometimes prolonged death. Uh So, then every
October I kept moving on in other directions and not
getting to the Demon Core. Here it finally is. The
Demon Core was a sphere of plutonium gallium alloy that

(01:04):
the United States made for an atomic bomb during World
War Two, and then after the war, researchers at Los
Alamos National Laboratory had two separate fatal criticality accidents while
working with it. Those accidents are also part of a
greater history of criticality accidents, most of which took place
in the nineteen fifties and sixties, so we're going to

(01:25):
talk about that progression today just to set some expectations.
Nuclear reactor melt downs like the disasters at Three Mile
Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima, those are a slightly different
thing from what we're talking about today. Some of them
could technically be classified as criticality accidents, but they're also
just a little bit bigger and the topics that were

(01:47):
focused on, So it makes sense of how these incidents
play out. We need to walk through a little bit
of science history. In two James Chadwick discovered the uncharged
sub atomic particle known as the neutron, and soon physicists
were using neutrons to study atoms, including bombarding atomic nuclei
with neutrons to study the results. It was through this

(02:09):
work that Otto han Lee's Mightner and Fritz Strassman discovered
nuclear fission. In night. Han had been working with uranium
samples that had been bombarded with neutrons, and for reasons
that they couldn't really explain, barium isotopes started appearing in
his samples as well. Mightner and Strassmann made the connection

(02:30):
that barium has about half the atomic mass of uranium,
so the uranium atoms were splitting into two roughly equal parts.
The idea that an atom could split in this way
had been suggested before, but it was not really taken
seriously at the time because it seemed absolutely contrary to
how people understood nuclear physics at that point. This breakdown

(02:53):
of uranium into barium didn't answer all the questions, though
Mightner also calculated that the two new arium nuclei would
be slightly less massive than the original uranium nucleus, with
the difference converted into energy. Auto Han was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission
in nine four. Although Miightner and Strassmann were mentioned in

(03:16):
the speech, they were not included in that award. Nuclear
fission can happen spontaneously in the natural world, and the
details can play out a little bit differently in different
elements and isotopes, but in terms of what we're talking
about today, it typically starts with neutrons. Neutrons interact with
the atoms nucleus, causing it to split. That split releases

(03:38):
one or more other neutrons, and in the right conditions,
those neutrons can reach the nuclei of other nearby atoms,
causing them to split that can continue on in a
chain reaction. If there's enough material in one place to
support a regular, ongoing, self sustaining chain reaction, that's known
as critical mass. In a super critic a mass, this

(04:00):
chain reaction unfolds at an escalating rate instead of a
steady one. It's not just about how much physical material
is in one place though the volume of the material.
It's geometry, it's concentration, its surroundings, and other factors all
play apart. As a hypothetical example, if you have a
very thin sheet of uranium two thirty five, a lot

(04:23):
of the neutrons that are released during fission are going
to fly off into the surrounding air without hitting any
uranium atoms. But if you have the same amount of
uranium two thirty five packed into a tight sphere, the
neutrons from the interior are far more likely to interact
with other nuclei as they travel, potentially starting a chain reaction.

(04:44):
So the elements that break down in these interactions are radioactive,
and the products of fission are generally radioactive as well.
The energy that's released during nuclear fission, which there can
be a lot of also includes ionizing radiation, and while
ionizing radiation has some beneficial uses, it can also be

(05:04):
incredibly destructive to living cells. Criticality accidents can expose people
and objects to just enormous amounts of radiation in an instant,
so facilities that handle these types of materials have to
take a lot of precautions to protect people from radiation
and to prevent an accidental criticality, which is sometimes also

(05:25):
called a power excursion. This includes restrictions on how much
material can be in a particular place and how it
should be handled. Containers to hold the material have to
be shaped in a way that is unfavorable for criticality
and made of materials that won't reflect too many sub
atomic particles back into the material, and people handling the

(05:46):
material have to be trained on how to prevent criticality accidents.
Some of this can be a little counterintuitive to outside observers.
For example, if you saw some plutonium rods play near
each other in a way that could potentially lead to
a criticality, your first instinct might be to move them

(06:07):
apart so that they would not do that. But a
person's own body can also reflect neutrons back at the material,
so that very act of trying to prevent a criticality
accident could actually wind up causing one instead. This is
a real example. It happened at Los Alamos National Laboratory
in August of eleven after somebody made an arrangement of

(06:28):
plutonium rods for a photo op. Fortunately, while what happened
was outside the bounds of safety guidelines, it did not
cause a criticality accident. Because nuclear fission releases energy, its
discovery had immediate and obvious implications for both energy production
and warfare, and multiple nations started trying to develop nuclear

(06:50):
reactors and atomic bombs. In the United States, the effort
to develop an atomic bomb was codenamed the Manhattan Project,
which also involved the construction of clear reactors to produce
the necessary radioactive materials for the bomb. For the most part,
the reactors converted naturally occurring uranium into uranium and plutonium fuel.

(07:11):
Most of the natural uranium that was used in American
projects during World War Two was mined and what was
then the Belgian Congo, and then after the war, that
source shifted to the Navajo Nation and surrounding areas. The environmental,
human rights and health consequences of these uranium mining operations,
some of which are extreme, are still ongoing today. For example,

(07:34):
there are still hundreds of abandoned uranium mines on or
near the lands of multiple indigenous nations in the US,
and even though the e p A has entered into
settlements totaling one point seven billion dollars, those settlements covered
clean up for fewer than half of these mines, and
almost none of them have actually been addressed at this point.

(07:57):
Although nuclear research took place at multi full facilities around
the country, the primary lamb for atomic bomb development in
the US was in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Simultaneously, researchers
had to figure out the technology for the bomb, produced
the nuclear material to power it, and figure out how
to handle that material safely without accidentally allowing it to

(08:19):
go critical or supercritical, all while trying to create a
weapon that was supposed to go super critical. One of
the bombs that was created through the Manhattan Project was
known as Little Boy. Then it was detonated over Hiroshima,
Japan on August. This bomb contained a subcritical mass of
enriched uranium along with a subcritical uranium projectile. A gun

(08:43):
fired the projectile into the mass, and together the mass
and the projectile were super critical. This bomb was equivalent
to about fifteen thousand tons of T and T. It
killed an estimated hundred and fifty thousand people and level
much of the city. The Manhattan Project also produced three
plutonium cores to be used in implosion style bombs during

(09:07):
World War Two. In this setup, the plutonium core is
surrounded by conventional explosives. When those explosives detonate, they compress
the core, causing it to go from subcritical to supercritical.
One of these cores was detonated at a test at
the Alama Gordo Bombing and Gunnery Range also called the
Trinity Site, on July sixteenth, ninety five. Another was used

(09:31):
in the bomb known as Fat Man, which was detonated
over Nagasaki, Japan, on August nine, ninety five, killing and
estimated seventy five thousand people. The third plutonium core was
nearing completion when Japan announced its surrender on August fifty five,
meaning that it was no longer needed for World War two. Later,

(09:53):
the U S started planning Operation Crossroads, which was a
test of nuclear weapons effects on worship at Seed to
take place off Bikini at all. This third core, the
one that would later be nicknamed the Demon Core, was
slated for use in these tests, but in the meantime
it was used for criticality research. It was during that

(10:14):
research that they nicknamed it the Demon Core, even though
to be clear, did not kill nearly as many people
as the other two that were detonated over cities. And
we're going to talk more about the Demon Core after
we first paused for a sponsor break. The plutonium core

(10:39):
that was eventually nicknamed the Demon Core was originally nicknamed Rufus.
I don't know why, but so many sources have said
that that seems legitimate. It was a six point to
kill agram or thirteen point seven pounds sphere, really two
hemispheres made of a fine plutonium and gallium. Under normal conditions,

(11:04):
it was of a critical mass, so it's often described
as having a hair trigger, although it had been created
for use in a bomb. This hair trigger also made
the core useful for criticality experiments. Physicists could intentionally reflect
neutrons back at the core to push it close to
criticality and gathered data about what was happening. Physicist Richard Feynman,

(11:27):
whose work with the Manhattan Project included helping to work
out standards to prevent criticality accidents. Reportedly nicknamed these types
of experiments tickling the Dragon's Tail. On August one, four
year old graduate student Harry Dallian Jr. Was working by
himself in the lab. Because of the nature of the

(11:49):
work that was being done at Los Alamos, like it
was critical to the war effort, it involved part of
the nation's nuclear material stockpile, it was standard for security
guards to always be asn't so. Even though Dallian was
working alone on this experiment, there was one other person
in the room. That was twenty nine year old Private
Robert Hamerley, who was sitting at a table about twelve

(12:11):
feet away from the core. Dallian was using tungsten carbide
bricks to build a reflective wall around the plutonium core
by hand. The bricks reflected neutrons back at the core,
inching it closer to criticality. The more bricks he added,
the more neutrons were reflected, and the closer the core
got to going critical. As Dallian was about to add

(12:33):
the last brick in this structure, his instruments showed that
doing so was going to cause the core to go critical,
so he tried to pull that last brick away, but
as he did, it slipped out of his hand and
dropped directly onto the core. Daalian used his other hand
to knock the dropped brick away, but it was too late.

(12:54):
There was a wave of heat and a brief flash
of blue light all around the exterior of the sphere.
That light was probably Chrinkov radiation, which is the result
of charged particles moving faster than the speed of light
through a transparent medium like air. In that brief moment
between when he dropped the brick and when he knocked

(13:14):
it away, Dallian was hit with a blast of neutron radiation.
He disassembled the reflector that he had built, and that
continued to expose him to gamma radiation while he was
doing so. Today, absorbed radiation is measured in gray, with
one gray being equivalent to one RADS. A sudden whole

(13:35):
body dose of zero point seven gray is enough to
cause acute radiation sickness. Sometimes symptoms can develop at as
little as zero point three gray. Dallian's dose was estimated
at five point one gray. He died twenty five days
after the accident. On September Private Hammerley's dose was estimated

(13:57):
at zero point five gray. He survived this incident apparently
without serious injury at the time. If you read older
articles that were published before his death later on like
they'll say that that he wasn't seriously harmed, but he
wound up dying of leukemia which might have been related
to this radiation exposure, when he was sixty two. Afterward,

(14:19):
criticality experiments continued at Los Alamos in spite of this fatality,
although some new safety standards were put into play. The
list of people allowed to do these kinds of experiments
was shortened, with two sets of monitoring equipment required for
each experiment. The new standards reiterated that at least two
people in addition to the guard, had to be present

(14:42):
for this kind of work. Researchers also started discussing whether
it would be better to do these kinds of experiments remotely,
so that if a criticality did happen, it would be
too far away from people to hurt them. Operation Crossroads
was scheduled to start in July, but before the core
was sent to the Marshall Islands to be used there,

(15:03):
physicists were doing one last set of criticality experiments with it.
On May one, Canadian physicist Louis Slowton was using a
hollow beryllium sphere to mostly cover up the core and
reflect neutrons back into it. The sphere had two halves
that the core was sort of resting in the bottom half,

(15:25):
and he had his thumb threaded through a hole in
the top half so that he could adjust the positioning
of this sort of dome with his hand. He knew
that if the sphere closed completely, it could cause a criticality,
so he used the end of a screwdriver to keep
the two halves slightly separate. This sounds like the kind

(15:45):
of thing I would do at my house with something
that is not dangerous, and even so my husband would go,
are you sure that's how you want to do it? Yes? Yes,
I have a story on this subject about myself that
I will probably tell in our Friday behind the Scene fabulous.
While while I have some understanding of how a person

(16:06):
might do a really foolish thing, knowing how foolish it is,
I was not handling potentially critical nuclear weapons cores at
the time. As he was doing this, the screwdriver slipped
and the dome totally closed, there was a brief flash
of blue light that was visible over the normal illumination

(16:28):
of the room. This lasted only a moment as Slowtan
flipped the dome off of the core. Slowton seems to
have immediately understood that he was not going to survive
this accident, saying, well, that does it. In general, a
whole body radiation dose of more than ten gray is
inevitably fatal, and his has been estimated at twenty one gray.

(16:52):
At the same time, he had the presence of mind
to try to document where the other seven observers in
the room had been standing at the time, and then
to try to calculate how large of a dose of
radiation each of them received. Their doses have been estimated
as ranging between zero point three seven and three point
six grade. Slodan also tried to detect how much radiation

(17:16):
was present in other objects that were in the room,
but the detectors themselves had been contaminated in the accident.
At the same time, he wasn't thinking entirely clearly. He
asked a colleague to scatter film badges used to detect
radiation exposure around the area, and that required the colleague
to get close to the radioactive Corps to do so.

(17:37):
Slowtan died nine days after this accident at the age
of thirty five, and although he was the only person killed,
three other people in the room had to be hospitalized
for acute radiation exposure, and one of them was Alvin C. Graves,
who was the closest to Slotan physically. When this accident happened.
Slotan had actually been training Graves as his replacement. Graves

(18:00):
was seriously injured and for a time it was not
certain whether he was going to survive. He later developed
cataracts and thyroid issues, and his death from a heart
attack nineteen years later may also have been related. In general,
people have viewed Harry Dallian Junior's accident with a bit
more sympathy than Lewis Slowtan's. Dallian was working alone, which

(18:22):
was against protocol, but he was also a graduate student,
so he was not as experienced as many of his colleagues. Slotan,
on the other hand, was not only a senior scientist,
but had also co authored the official report on the
accident that had killed Harry Dallian, so he definitely understood
the risks and the potential for accident. His experiment was

(18:42):
meant to be done with two one inch spacers between
the two halves of the Billiam sphere, but Slowtan had
removed these and was using the screwdriver in their place.
Multiple other scientists who were aware of the criticality experiment
he was doing thought it was inordinately danger risks, and
in general he had a reputation for being a little

(19:03):
too cavalier around things like atomic bomb cores. Scientists nicknamed
this core the demon Core, not just because it had
been part of both of these fatal accidents, but also
because of some eerie similarities between them. Both accidents took
placed on the twenty one of the month and on
a Tuesday, and Slotan and Dalian both died in the

(19:24):
same hospital room at the U S Engineer's Hospital at
Los Alamos. By this point, work had started on a
remote facility for criticality experiments, and after the second accident
with the Demon Core, hands on criticality experiments like this
were banned in criticality experiments resumed at the newly completed

(19:45):
critical experiments facility at what was known as the Pajarito Site.
Criticality experiments there were handled with machinery and took place
a quarter mile from the control room where the people
doing the experiments were. Since the amount of radiation drops
from actically the farther you are away from the source,
this was much safer than doing something like stacking reflective

(20:05):
blocks with your hands. Dallian and Slotan were the only
two people to die from acute radiation exposure at Los
Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Although there were numerous other
deaths in and around the facility during those same years,
a lot of them were from accidents that had nothing
to do with radioactive materials or bombs. This included motor

(20:28):
vehicle accidents, construction accidents, and in one case, a ten
year old who drowned when a canoe capsized. In six
three custodians also died of ethylene glycol poisoning after drinking
wine that was mixed with anti freeze. In terms of
the demon Core, for years after this incident happened, it
was believed that it was sent on to Bikini at

(20:50):
all for use in Operation Crossroads as planned, and while
it was described as quote a little hot but not
too hot to handle. After that second accident, it was
saved for the last detonation just in case that was
going to affect the results. That last test wound up
being canceled, and the demon Corps was later melted down
and reintegrated into the nuclear material stockpile. At some point

(21:14):
it was probably incorporated into other weapons. Before we move on,
we should note that there have been ongoing issues with
safety at Los Alamos National Laboratory in more recent years.
Aside from that, even plutonium photo op that we mentioned
earlier in sen it was rated does not meet expectations

(21:35):
in the Department of Energy Nuclear Criticality Safety Programs annual
report that was raised up to adequate but needs improvement
in eighteen and twenty nineteen. Also, that second accident with
the demon Core is dramatized in the nine film Fat
Man and Little Boy, with John Cusack as a fictionalized

(21:56):
Slotan who is named Michael Merriman in the film. I
watched just that scene while I was working on this,
and even knowing literally what's going to happen, I found
it very tense. Yeah, so we're gonna take a quick break.

(22:18):
The two incidents that we already talked about happened during
criticality experiments. The researchers were intentionally pushing the limits to
do tests and gather data. But many of the other
nuclear criticality accidents have happened while nuclear material was being
processed in some way, So these are people working at

(22:39):
facilities that were actively trying to avoid a criticality. However,
in a lot of cases, the workers who were actually
handling this material also were not nuclear physicists. In some cases,
they hadn't really been trained in criticality safety at all.
They didn't necessarily know that something like the size and
shape of a container could be an integral part of

(23:02):
preventing a disaster. For example, on March fifty three, at
the Mayac Enterprise facility in Russia, two workers were transferring
plutonium solution from one vessel to another. Vessels had been
arranged in a row along a wall, and every other
vessel was supposed to be left empty to prevent criticality.

(23:23):
The vessels were also supposed to contain at most five
hundred grams of plutonium, but neither of those limits was
actually being followed. Vessels contained plutonium when they weren't supposed to,
and also contained more than that five hundred grand limit,
So when a criticality occurred during the plutonium transfer, workers
not only did not know that it had happened, but

(23:46):
they also did not know that it had caused a
serious problem because they had not been trained on this.
They just noticed that one of the vessels became warm
to the touch, so they started removing the plutonium solution
out of it and kept on working. They only reported
the incident two days later when one of them suddenly
became ill. The worker who was closer to the vessel

(24:09):
when it went critical ultimately had to have both of
his legs amputated because of extreme tissue damage from this exposure.
But in some cases, the staff involved in these incidents
were trained. That was the case with Cecil Kelly, who
received a lethal radiation dose in a criticality accident at
Los Alamos on December. Kelly had more than a decade

(24:31):
of experience, but the tank he was working with had
a concentration of plutonium that was more than two hundred
times when it should have been. For reasons that are
not entirely clear. This happened during a physical inventory when
liquids from two holding vessels were moved into one larger vessel.
So Kelly was standing on a small ladder to see

(24:52):
into a viewing window on a tank that was being
used to chemically separate plutonium from other compounds, and when
he turned the stir on inside the tank, the shape
of the plutonium layer inside this solution allowed it to
go critical. The radiation dosed to his upper body has
been estimated at a hundred and twenty gray. Kelly either

(25:15):
fell or was knocked to the floor and was completely disoriented.
After the criticality. He kept saying I'm burning up, and
his colleagues and a nurse who arrived thought he had
sustained some kind of a chemical burn. The nurse even
commented that he had nice pink skin. This was actually
a sign of radiation exposure, like a mild sunburn, and

(25:36):
not a sign of being in good health. Yeah, because
of all of the all of the safety measures and
his training and all this other stuff. Like his colleagues,
it was like it took a while for them to
be like, did a criticality happen and we didn't realize it.
Kelly died thirty five hours after his exposure, and his
death actually sparked the human tissue analysis project at Salamos.

(26:01):
They would keep tissue samples for further study, and that
actually led to a lawsuit. Kelly's family had authorized an
autopsy to determine his cause of death, but they did
not imagine that that was going to include tissue samples
being retained for further study through this program. Other criticality
accidents during the nineteen fifties and sixties stemmed from workers

(26:25):
intentionally bypassing safeguards meant to prevent them. One such accident
happened on July nineteen sixty four at a facility that
recovered uranium from scrap metal in Wood River Junction, Rhode Island.
This facility had been in operation for about four months
and part of the process involved workers manually shaking eleven

(26:45):
leader bottles full of contaminated solvent. This was a tedious
process that no one particularly enjoyed, so a worker had
the idea to combine the contents of several eleven liter
bottles into a large tank and to use a stir
running Concurrently with that decision, one of the plants evaporators

(27:06):
had not been working properly, and it turned out that
this was because it was plugged with uranal nitrate crystals,
that is, a uranium salt. Fixing that problem involved filling
several bottles with a concentrated grail nitrate solution. As that
plug was dissolved and removed. Even though those bottles were labeled,

(27:27):
someone mistook them for the ones that contained the contaminated solvent,
which was being mixed in the large tank. When the
concentrated urinal nitrate solution was dumped into the tank, it
went critical, causing a blue white flash of light and
splashing liquid up and out of the tank and directly
onto the worker. The criticality alarm sounded and the worker

(27:50):
ran to a nearby emergency shack. A supervisor who came
in to investigate turned off the stir in the tank,
which caused a second criticality as the solution change shape,
But no one knew about the second criticality at the
time because the alarm was still going off from the
first one. Yet there were multiple multiple failures in the

(28:11):
process and the safety measures that were involved in this incident.
The technician who had been working the tank during that
first criticality died of acute radiation exposure two days later
after a radiation dose of about a hundred gray. The
supervisor's dose was somewhere around one gray. Other people nearby

(28:33):
were also exposed to lesser doses as well. A similar
incident took place at the MAAC Enterprise facility. On January
sco workers decided to drain a tank that had been
used to hold material from criticality experiments faster than it
was designed to drain. They removed the bolts that were

(28:53):
holding the tank to the structure and tipped it over
to drain it into containers. The shape of the material
created in this process allowed a criticality, which ejected a
huge amount of material from the tank. Three of the
four people who were doing this task died as a result,
and the fourth, who was about three meters away at
the time, was blinded and had long term damage to

(29:15):
the systems and organs on the left side of her body,
which was closer to the tank when it went critical. Yeah.
I took notes on so many other incidents as I
was working on this, and it's really like almost the
same story over and over and over. A lot of
it involves containers of the wrong size or shape being

(29:38):
used when they should not have been. So the good
news is criticality accidents like this are far less common
today than they were during the nineteen fifties and sixties.
Some of this is thanks to the end of the
Cold War, so the rush to develop and produce nuclear weapons.
Meant the United States and the Soviet Union in particular,

(29:59):
had a lot of facilities that were working with these
kinds of materials. As we noted earlier, the accumulation of
enough material to even be able to cause a criticality
and an understanding of what it took to prevent a criticality,
those two things were happening in tandem. In some cases,
these facilities are basically working out safety standards as they went,

(30:21):
and others though they were disregarding safety standards in order
to get work done faster or march cheaply. But it's
also because as these incidents happened, the governments and facilities
involved got better at designing procedures and protocols to prevent
them in the future, like instead of having a line
of containers half of which were meant to be left empty,

(30:42):
just not having containers arranged in a way that a
criticality could ever result, or not allowing containers with geometry
that could allow a criticality into the facility at all.
As a result, when it comes to criticality accidents during
processing and handling, the world has gone from multiple fatal
accidents every year to fewer than one per decade. The

(31:05):
other side of that progression, though, is that when criticality
accidents have happened since then, a lot of times they've
been just totally unexpected. In there was a criticality at
the fuel conversion test building at the j c O
Fabrication Plant Company site and Tokamura, Japan. Workers were using

(31:26):
containers with unfavorable geometry because the ones they were supposed
to be using were more difficult to fill, and the
criticality accident that resulted from this was ongoing, with criticalities
recurring over the course of twenty hours. Two are the
three workers who were nearby when it started. Died when
radiation was released into surrounding neighborhoods around the plant. Although

(31:49):
this incident was similar to earlier ones in that workers
had been using the wrong containers to make their jobs easier,
it was also really an outlier. There were so many
procedures and standards in place at the facility that people
didn't think of criticality was even possible there. Because of
this belief, there weren't even criticality alarms at the facility.

(32:12):
The censors that reported something amiss we're gamma detectors. Yeah,
So if we're gonna have to have nuclear facilities doing
such work. Uh, the good news is we're better at
it now, Golfully, as I was working on this and
I was going through all of these, um, all of

(32:32):
these criticality incidents, I got to this point where I
was like, man, what what's an outcome that can be here?
Because just having one after another of these incidents wasn't
just incredibly grim And it really is like if you
look at sort of a timeline, it goes from just

(32:54):
a block of multiple every year through the fifties and
sixties too, Like we get to the seventies and it's
like one and then a whole long time and then one.
So fingers crossed, we are passed this as a society
and a global world culture. Shure. Yeah, I have so

(33:18):
many questions. We can discuss them in our Friday episode.
In the meantime, do you have listener mail? I knew
it's from Rachel and the title was Nina O Taro
Warren in real life, and I was like, oh, all right,
I'm curious about this email. Um So, Rachel talks about
living in Gwynette County, Georgia, so right outside of Atlanta,

(33:40):
super close to our our headquarters. And our recent episode
on nina O Taro Warren and her voting efforts. Basically,
Rachel had tried to figure out where her mail in
ballot was for the election because it had not arrived yet,
and Rachel says quote worried, contacted my local League of

(34:01):
Women Voters for more info and learned that Gwynette County
is the only county in Georgia that's required to provide
election materials in both English and Spanish. Because of this
and a recent lawsuit, the envelopes are larger than normal
and are sent to a special printer. But not to worry.
My ballot is on the way and will arrive soon.
It's just taking its time. Rachel then links to an

(34:23):
article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about um like this
whole why why it's taking longer for Gwennette County ballots.
It wasn't until I heard the episode about Otaro Warren
that I learned why my county requires bi lingual materials.
So it's very excited to learn this history about something
that is currently affecting my life, and to learn about
such an amazing woman. Keep up the great work, Rachel,

(34:45):
Thank you so much. Rachel, I did not know that
Gwynette County was one of the places where there need
to be voting materials printed in Spanish. In uh, most
of the things that you read that are about that
particular issue with the with like the language Minority amendments
to the Voting Rights Act. They talk a lot about, um,

(35:07):
New Mexico and Texas and places that have a large
indigenous population. UM. And I didn't realize that the uh
that there were communities in Georgia not that far from
where I used to live that actually met that threshold. UM.
I of course knew there were lots of Spanish speakers
in Gwynette County, but not to the point of like
triggering that uh, that part of the Voting Rights Act amendments.

(35:30):
So thank you Rachel for getting a touch about that.
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