“Criticality event” here doesn’t mean a nuclear explosion. It means beginning of a chain reaction which releases lots of neutrons and heat, but it has entirely local impact. Only people in that room would be affected by that spike in radiation (and I don’t think that’s just an open workshop), after which the rods would likely melt and spread across the table, thus ending the chain reaction.
it’s very difficult technically to cause a nuclear explosion even though the knowledge is widely available because it’s not just enough to put plutonium on a heap (in which case it will just heat up and melt, as described above), but you need to actually compress the critical mass in a very precisely confined area as a matter of microseconds. Which is why control of #nuclear proliferation is relatively easy job globally, as you simply control sales in the niche market of ultra-high precision equipment that allows you to do the latter.
Radiation has been incredibly mystified by various scare stories, but in reality people are literally diving in spent nuclear fuel pools doing things because just a meter thick layer of water completely absorbs the radiation:
https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/divers-take-the-plunge-in-spent-fuel-pond
Here’s a very good lecture by an actual nuclear health scientist specifically on that subject:
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