![]() “There was no other explanation.”įor such a phenomenon to have happened naturally, these uranium deposits in western Equatorial Africa must have had to contain a critical mass of U-235 to start the reaction. “After more studies, including on-site examinations, they discovered that the uranium ore had gone through fission on its own,” said Ludovic Ferrière, curator of the rock collection at Vienna’s Natural History Museum, where a part of the curious rock will be presented to the public in 2019. There was only one possible explanation - the rock was evidence of natural fission that occurred over two billion years ago. The conclusion: the uranium ore was natural and had gone through fission. Even more bedazzling, they discovered a footprint of fission products in the ore. This could explain why the ratio was lower than normal.īut after complementary analyses, Perrin and his peers confirmed that the uranium ore was completely natural. What did this mean? At first, all the physicists could think of was that the uranium ore had gone through artificial fission, i.e. that some of the U-235 isotopes had been forced to split in a nuclear chain reaction. But that bit of rock from Oklo contained only 0.717%. If you were to extract it from the Earth’s crust, or from rocks from the moon or in meteorites, that’s what you would find. All natural uranium today contains 0.720% of U-235. The physicists’ first, logical response to such an unusual ratio of U-235 was that this was not natural uranium. Only a tiny bit less, but enough to make the researchers sit back and scratch their heads. On the other, accepted scientific data about the constant ratio of radioactive uranium in ore.Įxamination of this high-grade ore from a mine in Gabon was found to contain a lower proportion of uranium-235 (U-235) - the fissile sort. On the one hand, there was a dark piece of radioactive natural uranium ore, extracted from a mine in Africa. Physicist Francis Perrin sat at a nuclearfuel-processing plant down in the south of France, thinking to himself: “This cannot be possible.” It was 1972. ![]()
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