Researchers Discover A 2 Billion Year Old Nuclear Reactor In Africa

In 1972, a worker at a nuclear fuel processing plant noticed something suspicious in a routine analysis of uranium obtained from a normal mineral source from Africa. As is the case with all natural uranium, the material under study contained three isotopos- ie three forms with different atomic masses: uranium 238, the most abundant variety; uranium 234, the rarest and uranium 235, the isotope that is coveted because it can sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

Via UsualRoutine


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. Soon, researchers and scientists from all over the world gathered in Gabon to explore what was going on with the Uranium from Oklo.





Researchers have dubbed the Nuclear Reactor at Oklo as a “natural Nuclear Reactor”, but the truth about it goes far beyond our normal understanding. Some of the researchers that participated in the testing of the Nuclear reactor concluded that the minerals had been enriched in the distant past, around 1.8 billion years ago, to spontaneously produce a chain reaction. They also concluded that water had been used to moderated the reaction in the same way that the modern nuclear reactors cool down using graphite-cadium shafts preventing the reactor from going into critical state and exploding. All of this, “in nature”.


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 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 that in a natural formation.


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