Understanding the 2 Billion-Year-Old Natural Nuclear Reactor In W Africa

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "In June 1972, nuclear scientists at the Pierrelatte uranium enrichment plant in south-east France noticed a strange deficit in the amount of uranium-235 they were processing. That's a serious problem in a uranium enrichment plant where every gram of fissionable material has to be carefully accounted for. The ensuing investigation found that the anomaly originated in the ore from the Oklo uranium mine in Gabon, which contained only 0.600% uranium-235 compared to 0.7202% for all other ore on the planet. It turned out that this ore was depleted because it had gone critical some 2 billion years earlier, creating a self-sustaining nuclear reaction that lasted for 300,000 years and using up the missing uranium-235 in the process. Since then, scientists have studied this natural reactor to better understand how buried nuclear waste spreads through the environment and also to discover whether the laws of physics that govern nuclear reactions may have changed in the 1.5 billion years since the reactor switched off. Now a review of the science that has come out of Oklo shows how important this work has become but also reveals that there is limited potential to gather more data. After an initial flurry of interest in Oklo, mining continued and the natural reactors--surely among the most extraordinary natural phenomena on the planet-- have all been mined out."

Comments

I don't know but there for Aliens.

[Noishkel]

Come on... who here doesn't think that this isn't the remains of a eons own star cruiser out there?

Well okay, it probably isn't... but it would be cool if it was!

Re:More awesome than Autobots. Us, I mean

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Obviously, that uranium ice cream must good for the nuclear family.

Careful...

[Mayhem178]

Don't let the hippies hear you suggest that fission is a naturally occurring process. They might...

*sunglasses*

...go nuclear.