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The story begins when a layer of radioactive ash was found in Rajasthan, India. It covered a three-square mile area, ten miles west of Jodhpur. The research occurred after a very high rate of birth defects and cancer was discovered in the area. The levels of radiation registered so high on investigators’ gauges that the Indian government cordoned off the region. Scientists then apparently unearthed an ancient city where they found evidence of an atomic blast dating back thousands of years: from 8,000 to 12,000 years.
The blast was said to have destroyed most of the buildings and probably a half-million people.
Ancient nuclear reactors buried in lake and shallow ocean sediments may have cooked early microbes, according to a new study. And radiation from the deposits could have delayed the onset of our modern-day, oxygen-rich atmosphere, and even had a hand in shaping the genetics of primordial life.
Natural nuclear reactors dating to 2 billion years ago have been found in Gabon, Africa. Though long since exhausted, scientists know from the unusually low quantity of the Uranium-235 isotope in the rock that they once went critical, and hosted a sustained fission reaction that went on for as long as two hundred thousand years.
A billion years earlier, such deposits could have been common, say Laurence Coogan and Jay Cullen of the University of Victoria. The first oxygen-producing bacteria colonized lakes and shallow seas, and likely created oxygen 'oases' in an otherwise nitrogen-dominated world.
GODS NUKE SINAI SPACEPORT BEFORE LEAVING EARTH TO MARDUK
Marduk proclaimed to the senior Anunnaki gods, "In my temple house let all the gods assemble, my covenant accept....By his appeal for their submission, the Anunnaki gods were disturbed and alarmed.
To a great assembly, council to take, Enlil them all summoned. Opposed to Marduk and Nabu they all were."
In May 1972 a worker at a nuclear fuel–processing plant in France noticed something suspicious. He had been conducting a routine analysis of uranium derived from a seemingly ordinary source of ore. As is the case with all natural uranium, the material under study contained three isotopes— that is to say, three forms with differing 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. Elsewhere in the earth’s crust, on the moon and even in meteorites, uranium 235 atoms make up 0.720 percent of the total. But in these samples, which came from the Oklo deposit in Gabon (a former French colony in west equatorial Africa), uranium 235 constituted just 0.717 percent. That tiny discrepancy was enough to alert French scientists that something strange had happened. Further analysis showed that ore from at least one part of the mine was far short on uranium 235: some 200 kilograms appeared to be missing— enough to make half a dozen or so nuclear bombs.
For weeks, specialists at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) remained perplexed. The answer came only when someone recalled a prediction published 19 years earlier. In 1953 George W. Wetherill of the University of California at Los Angeles and Mark G. Inghram of the University of Chicago pointed out that some uranium deposits might have once operated as natural versions of the nuclear fission reactors that were then becoming popular. Shortly thereafter, Paul K. Kuroda, a chemist from the University of Arkansas, calculated what it would take for a uraniumore body spontaneously to undergo selfsustained fission. In this process, a stray neutron causes a uranium 235 nucleus to split, which gives off more neutrons, causing others of these atoms to break apart in a nuclear chain reaction. Kuroda’s first condition was that the size of the uranium deposit should exceed the average length that fission-inducing neutrons travel, about two thirds of a meter. This requirement helps to ensure that the neutrons given off by one fissioning nucleus are absorbed by another before escaping from the uranium vein. A second prerequisite is that uranium 235 must be present in sufficient abundance. Today even the most massive and concentrated uranium deposit cannot become a nuclear reactor, because the uranium 235 concentration, at less than 1 percent, is just too low. But this isotope is radioactive and decays about six times faster than does uranium 238, which indicates that the fissile fraction was much higher in the distant past. For example, two billion years ago (about when the Oklo deposit formed) uranium 235 must have constituted approximately 3 percent, which is roughly the level provided artificially in the enriched uranium used to fuel most nuclear power stations. The third important ingredient is a neutron “moderator,” a substance that can slow the neutrons given off when a uranium nucleus splits so that they are more apt to induce other uranium nuclei to break apart. Finally, there should be no significant amounts of boron, lithium or other so-called poisons, which absorb neutrons and would thus bring any nuclear reaction to a swift halt. Amazingly, the actual conditions that prevailed two billion years ago in what researchers eventually determined to be 16 separate areas within the Oklo and adjacent Okelobondo uranium mines were very close to what Kuroda outlined. These zones were all identified decades ago. But only recently did my colleagues and I finally clarify major details of what exactly went on inside one of those ancient reactors.