Natural thermonuclear explosion? That's just what they want you to believe, it's a relic of a nuclear war that took place there millenia ago between long extinct species.
Not a bad idea for fiction that.
...but seriously, I've always found the natural nuclear event theory fascinating.
Actually, I was joking but according to
Reddit, Brandenburg did suggest it was an alien nuclear bomb.
I'm not entirely sure that's what he was getting at.
He was probably trying to sell books but honestly what do we know? It takes such a unique set of conditions for it to come to fruition. The following link could also be a good plot for science fiction but I find it fascinating as well. Makes one think, what if?
https://gizadeathstar.com/2016/01/t...or-in-africa-may-not-be-so-natural-after-all/
There's so much here that raised my eyebrows - as it the the scientists involved, as the article notes - that one doesn't know where to begin. But consider the implications of these statements:
Elsewhere in the earth’s crust, on the moon and even in meteorites, we can find uranium 235 atoms that makes up only 0.720 percent of the total. But in the samples that were analyzed, which came from the Oklo deposit in Gabon, a former French colony in West Africa, the uranium 235 constituted only 0.717 percent.
That small difference was enough to alert French scientists that there was something very strange going on with the minerals.
These small details led to further investigations which showed that least a part of the mine was well below the normal amount of uranium 235: some 200 kilograms appeared to have been extracted in the distant past, today, that amount is enough to make half a dozen nuclear bombs.
Note first of all that this "natural reactor" occurs in a mine, which is hardly a natural structure, and that uranium had apparently been mined and extracted.
THen, there's this set of observations and admissions:
What was fund in Oklo surprised everyone gathered there, the site where the uranium originated from is actually an advanced subterranean nuclear reactor that goes well beyond the capabilities of our present scientific knowledge.
Researchers believe that this ancient nuclear reactor is around 1.8 billion years old and operated for at least 500,000 years in the distant past.
...
Incredibly, our modern-day nuclear reactors are really not comparable both in design and functionality with this huge megareactor.
According to studies, this ancient nuclear reactor was several kilometers long. Interestingly, for a large nuclear reactor like this, thermal impact towards the environment was limited to just 40 meters on all sides.
So, in addition to being in a
mine, this natural reactor is also of a much larger size than normal fission reactors, and manages to store nuclear waste materials via natural geopological features limiting thermal signatures to about 40 meters from the reactor. But wait, there's more:
What is surprising is that a nuclear reaction had occurred in a way that the plutonium, the by-product, was created and the nuclear reaction itself had been moderated, which is considered as a “holy grail” for atomic science.
The ability to moderate the reaction means that once the reaction was initiated, it was possible to leverage the output power in a controlled way, with the ability to prevent catastrophic explosions or the release of the energy at a single time.
In other words, like all fission reactors, this one was capable of synthesizing plutonium, did so, and then prevented this from going critical and exploding by moderating the thermal neutrons that make fission chain reactions possible, by using a moderator like water or cadmium rods to slow down and absorb enough neutrons to prevent an explosion from taking place.
In other words, moderation implies that the African reactor, almost 2 billion years old,
is not a natural phenomenon at all, but a deliberate product of design and intelligence:
However, Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, former head of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and Nobel Prize winner for his work in the synthesis of heavy elements, pointed out that for uranium to “burn” in a reaction, conditions must be exactly right.
For example, the water involved in the nuclear reaction must be extremely pure. Even a few parts per million of contaminant will “poison” the reaction, bringing it to a halt. The problem is that no water that pure exists naturally anywhere in the world.Several specialists talked about the incredible Nuclear Reactor at Oklo, stating that at no time in the geologically estimated history of the Oklo deposits was the uranium sufficiently rich (i.e. Uranium 235) for a natural nuclear reaction to occur.
When these deposits were formed in the distant past, due to the slowness of the radioactive decay of U-235, the fissionable material would have constituted only 3 percent of the total deposits — something too low, mathematically speaking, for a nuclear reaction to take place.
However, a reaction took place mysteriously, suggesting that the original uranium was far richer in Uranium 235 than it is found in a natural formation.
Now to put all this country simple: what this reactor suggests is first of all (1) it is the process of deliberate design (2) its sophistication is indicated by its size (3) it is almost 2 billion years old, and thus (3) constitutes corroboration of the thesis that there was a very ancient high civilization right here on Earth in the mists of High Antiquity,
long before modern man appears in the genetic record. WHoever
was here was "someone else." And it called to mind those mysterious "balls" that I mentioned in
The Cosmic War, and which were first mentioned by Cremo and Thompson in their book
Forbidden Archaeology. These balls were clearly machined objects, since three parallel groves were etched into their equator, and above this, a "pit" or "crater" appeared. These balls were discovered in South Africa in deposits that gave them an approximate age by stratigraphic dating of about 3 billion years.
I find all this intriguing for a variet of reasons, not the least of which is the
earliness of the appearance of nuclear technologies, when compared to the textual records of "wars of the gods" from the Hindu, Mesopotamian, and other traditions, which indicate a cosmic war
at a much later date. Assuming the civilizations or people fighting them and making reactors in Africa to be one and the same, this suggests that the nuclear development was
not the peak development of its destructive science. Conversely, one might assume that this civilization declined(for whatever reason) and gave birth to another.
The chronological difficutlties of the texts, compared to the dating of this reactor, reinforce what I've been suggesting for a long time, and ever since my book
The Cosmic War, namely, that it is far too early to construct an alternative timeline of events: our knowledge is still too sketchy. I strongly suspect, however, that that chronology
could be broadly outlined, when and if we really explore the off-planet indications of artifical structures and "extra-terrestrial archaeology". For the moment, however, we have another clear indicator that the "standard narrative" of a long evolutionary "pre-history," and then of the emergence of mankind some 150,000-200,000 years ago, to the emergence of "hunter-gatherer" and then agrarian societies, leaves a
lot to be desired.
You mean right now? Zero percent chance. There are a few important things to consider for “natural occurring nuclear reactors”...
- It is only possible with fissile isotopes: Protactinium-230, Uranium-233, Neptunium-235, Uranium-235, Plutonium-239, Plutonium-241, Americium-243, or other intermediates.
- All of them have decayed completely because they have short half lives (e.g. Plutonium-239 has a half life of ~20,000 years) or don't exist naturally altogether, apart from Uranium-235. The rest are all bred or artificially produced these days.
- The ratio of Uranium-235 (fissile and with a half life of ~700 million years to the final Plumbum-204) to Uranium-238 (non-fissile with a half life of ~4.5 billion years) is 0.007 right now, so it is exceedingly rare (for reference, nuclear reactors typically operate in the .03 to .05 range), so the probability of it existing in sufficiently enriched forms in clustered shells that can sustain a reaction with even strong moderators (to sufficiently slow down the neutrons) is highly unlikely.
In the past? Maybe...
- The Uranium-235 on Earth wasn't actually made on Earth, but naturally synthesized in a supernova (or perhaps a merger of neutron stars) in the distant past...and has always existed through the Earth's ~4.5 billion year span according to cosmochronological estimates (which were actually used to date the Earth).
- Stands to reason that the concentrations would have been much higher in the past because a lot of the fissile substance wouldn't have decayed yet.
- At some point you could have had concentrations that could sustain a reaction in the presence of moderators, yes. For reference, the ratio of Uranium-235 to Uranium-238 at the time of the supernova/merger that produced them is theorized to be ~1.5 — at some point, you could have had concentrations that could sustain a natural reactor in the presence of a suitable moderator because of the comparative abundance of fissile Uranium-235 vis-à-vis the current Cenozoic Era.
P.S. I'm not a nuclear physicist or geochemist, and this is only an educated guess on the basis of what I know (and could definitely be off the mark). For example, the event that created the Uranium-235 might not have been single stage (and it is entirely possible that it was deposited in shells over a vast period of time via several supernovae/mergers)!
Thank you for putting it so clearly. I've learned something
