Scientists Confirm First Nuclear Reactor Was Natural, Not Man-Made.
When Enrico Fermi and his team constructed a nuclear reactor way back in 1942, they were adamant that it was the world’s first of its kind, and that nothing like this could have ever been done before, and celebrated right up until 1972.
When Enrico Fermi and his team constructed a nuclear reactor way back in 1942, they were adamant that it was the world’s first of its kind, and that nothing like this could have ever been done before, and celebrated right up until 1972. However, they did not take mother nature into consideration, and when nuclear scientists discovered that the concentration of isotopes from within the ore found at a site in Oklo in Gabon, Africa was not quite as they should have been.
The samples from Oklo were taken to be tested further, and the results concluded that they were missing a significant amount of urnaium-235, which is found in natural uranium deposits. So, where had it gone? Scientists discovered that some billions of years ago the ore had been decomposed during natural nuclear reactions that lasted for thousands of years, self-reacting over and over again.
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Nuclear fission is where the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts, releasing more neutrons. As a result, this releases an enormous amount of energy and causes the neutrons to strike other atoms and split those, releasing more neutrons and continuing the reaction cycle. For the reactor to keep fuelled, it used water as its moderator.
According to scientists, these natural reactions carried on for many of thousands of years, until finally, so much of the uranium-235 had been split that there was not enough left to refuel the reaction cycle and the reactor shut down. However, there were 17 natural reactor sites found in total near Okli and Okelobondo uranium mines alone, so there could be much more on our doorsteps just waiting to be discovered.
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Yusuf Demir
Yusuf Demir is the Cloud & Software Reporter at TrendinTech, where he covers cloud infrastructure, enterprise platforms, developer tools and the digital transformation of businesses in the UK and the United States. He previously reported on enterprise technology for The Register in London and covered the cloud and SaaS beat for TechCrunch, following the competition between AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, the open source licensing disputes and the rise of Kubernetes. Yusuf holds an MEng in Computing from Imperial College London and speaks regularly at KubeCon and AWS re:Invent, where he moderates conversations with engineers and chief technology officers. He is most interested in the gap between vendor roadmaps and the systems engineers actually run, and in what the cloud bill looks like once the free credits expire.
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