Reactor at Earth's Core?

An anonymous submitter sent in this story suggesting that uranium in the Earth's core may be acting as a giant breeder reactor, generating a large amount of heat and perhaps being responsible for the Earth's magnetic field.

Comments

Re:Only if you don't read it carefully

[Graymalkin]

What the fuck are you talking about? Jupiter is 310 Earth masses, about a third of that is the rocky core mass as well as the metallic hydrogen mass. Most of the condensation heat is generated not by the rocky inner core but the several thousand miles worth of metallic hydrogen moving about in its highly conductive way. Heat transfer through a metallic liquid is very efficient due to the sheer density of the material. Any compression on that material is going to generate a bit of heat that is efficiently transfered. The inner rocky mass according to all models is not a solid rocky core but a liquid one about the size of the Earth. Please recall that the liquid rock core is the size of the Earth, not the size of the Earth's core.

Uranium mixed with iron will not start a reactor but that is not what I suggested was happening. Uranium mixed with iron will will radiate and generate heat and decay byproducts like say...helium-4. Fission reactions in the Earth's core would produce far more genergy than the pressures of gravitation could contain and the planet would explode. I wasn't defending nor suggesting the idea that fission is taking place in the core.

No the Earth's core is not solid. It is very dense but seismic data does not suggest it is fully solid. It is more of a hyper plastic, there is elastic motion in the material of the core but the resistance is very high due to the density of the material which is believed to be mostly unoxidized iron. The differenciation begins at the upper surfaces of the core where the extremely hot yet lighter material separates from the dense iron in inner core.

I said the dynamo effect of the Sun's magnetic field followed the same princibles as the Earth's; did you miss that part? The dynamics are the same but the generation source is very different in terms of relative position in the sphere. The core of the Earth is responsible for generating our magnetic field making the magnetic twisting of the fast moving equitorial material a much slower process because the radial velocity differences are much lower than of the Sun's convective zone. The Sun's convective zone which is generating the magnetic field is much larger is preportion than the metallic core of the Earth causing a much faster magnetic field flipping effect. As seen in glacial core samples as well as some deep rock cores the Earth's magnetic field changes polarity MUCH slower than the Sun's and is much less active.