Was “Splendor in the Grass” one of them? I was a pre teen when I saw that, my mother’s “favorite” film. Even at 12 I thought what the fuck was that horseshit?

Yeah it was totally common for female characters in 50s-60s to be so “overly emotional” that they would try to kill themselves if they didn’t get a love interest right away (Sabrina, for example) or for a number of other random incidents.

Is rape better than suicide? I just watched three movies in a row from the late 50s early 60s that all feature a young woman’s attempted suicide as a major plot point. They were rom-coms.

came here for this

Yeah, I saw the '2.5 lbs' of uranium and thought "That's not a reactor - that's a test instrument.'. And given the size - I have to wonder if the uranium is more for shielding the Californium than anything else, U being denser than Pb...

Yes. This is a subcritical research reactor. The Californium was used as a neutron source to bombard the highly enriched uranium, causing chains of fission events that greatly amplified the neutron flux.

C'mon guys, get your facts right. It wasn't a reactor; the radioactive material in it functioned as a neutron source for neutron activation analysis (the "check materials for impurities" purpose mentioned in the article) and radiography testing. Even in the case of exposure to the Californium-252 that was left in the…