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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."
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!
Except for the shallow one mentioned at the end of the article that still remains, just mostly washed out...
It seems like the other aspects they wanted to study (like the spread of byproducts) is still feasible, since those would have spread beyond the mining site if they spread at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What's the deal with these ads that pop up from the bottom on slashdot?
Wasn't the "beta" experiment enough to piss people off with?
They need to find new ways?
Is there a non-tablet-friendly version of the article? One that's non-blinding on a normal screen?
Sorry for trying to read it...
CTRL-A, open your text editor, CTRL-V
What bollocks. I think the actual question to ask is how it's possible to create the conditions for an very large (the size of the mine)and extremely low density (the concentration of natural ore) nuclear reactor.
In the days the preference for civilian reactors was to develop further along the design of the compact high density submarine reactors. The nuclear industry never got over that. There are prototypes of large reactors with much lower power density. It's a natural question to ask how low enrichment and low density one can go.
Why "dump" anything?
Reprocess. Instead of polluting the environment with stuff that has a half-life measured in thousands of years, keep reprocessing it, and burn the stuff down into something that could be used in next-gen reactors and keep going until you've extracted as much energy from it as possible and the remaining waste has a half-life measured in decades or a few short centuries.
Done right it can be reprocessed on-site and almost in-situ.
This way there's no need for large containment vessels to sit out in what's essentially a parking lot in the back.
At the end of it all, you wind up with a relatively tiny amount of waste, compared to what we output today. Easier to store, easier to manage, easier to transport when a site finally completely decommissions and is returned to nature.
Dumping it into space is the equivalent of shitting on your elderly neighbor's lawn. You may not have to deal with it right away, but it's eventually going to come back and haunt you.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"...the equivalent of shitting on your elderly neighbor's lawn. You may not have to deal with it right away, but it's eventually going to come back and haunt you."
I'm pretty sure I'll outlive my elderly neighbour. In fact, I think I'll *make* sure I do, brb.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Obviously, that uranium ice cream must good for the nuclear family.
Ezekiel 23:20
A post offers reprocessing as a solution to the reactor waste problem, and a proper counter to that argument is that reprocessing has a waste problem all its own. The total amount of long-lived waste may be reduced, but the "hot" shorter lived waste get spread around into corrosive liquid effluents?
Could a a person remind Slashdot readers of this tradeoff without suggesting that the original post was made by an untutored fool? Or is it important to label someone suggesting reprocessing as a foolish person, to offer a (mild) public scolding of their idea because reprocessing is a bad enough policy that shaming is merited?
It's conceivable that some constants and such have a slight drift. Hell, space itself appears to be expanding so anything is fair game IMHO!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Don't let the hippies hear you suggest that fission is a naturally occurring process. They might...
...go nuclear.
*sunglasses*
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles