Reddit reviews Atomic Awakening: A New Look At The History And Future Of Nuclear Power

I read about a guy who committed suicide by carrying a bit of radioactive material in his pocket for a while. Slow and painful death.

think it was in this book.

I was reading about these while on holiday (this is one of a series of 3 books that are quite interesting and look at the history of nuclear power, various accidents over the course of developing it and what the future might hold: https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Awakening-History-Future-Nuclear/dp/1605981273 ), and the US spent billions developing nuclear powered planes in 60's and they were wild. Basically take a regular nuclear reactor and remove all the thick and heavy concrete and lead shielding around (which is crazy heavy!), and you have a flying nuke that irradiates pretty much everything around it (better hope you don't live near an airfield one of these takes off from!). They even built a dedicated testing facility out in Georgia so they could figure out what affect radiation would have on various plane parts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Nuclear_Aircraft_Laboratory), which it turns out lots of plane parts didn't like massive doses of radiation, rubber in the tyres would turn solid, hydraulic fluid would turn to jelly, oh and the pilots were recommended to be older men who already had kids since even with a special 12 tonne shield between the reactor and the pilots they would still get some exposure.

It did go critical, but it did not power the plane. The reactor was placed on a plane with conventional propulsion and followed by two planes. One was filled with detection equipment and the other was full of airborne Marines to set up a containment zone around a possible crash site. Source

There were at least two test reactiors that went critical to test the entire propulaion system, but neither went airborne. A third naked reactor was built outside of Dawsonville, GA to blast various aircraft parts with high levels of radiation to make sure they could hold up over time. Source

Edit: sources. Second source is lacking, but I had read three books that have touched on what happened at the lab. Atomic Awakening and Atomic Adventures are really good reads. Apparently there was a 1000' circle of land around the naked reactor that absolutely no life existed during the site's operation.