Scattered throughout the earth are many so-called. nuclear repositories - places where spent nuclear fuel is stored. All of them were built in recent decades to reliably hide the dangerous by-products of nuclear power plants.
But mankind has nothing to do with one of the burial grounds: it is not known who built it and even when - scientists carefully determine its age at 1.8 billion years.
Oklo Phenomenon
In 1972, at a developing uranium deposit in Oklo (Africa, Gabon), an inquisitive laboratory assistant noticed that the percentage of U-235 in the ore was below the standard by 0.003%. Despite the seemingly insignificant deviation, for scientists it was an emergency. In all terrestrial uranium ores and even in samples delivered from the Moon, the uranium content in the ore is always 0.7202%, for what reason was ore raised from the mines in Oklo, containing 0.7171%, or even less?
Most of all, scientists are afraid of the incomprehensible, so in 1975 a scientific conference was held in the capital of Gabon, Libreville, at which atomic scientists were looking for an explanation of the phenomenon.
After much debate, it was decided to consider the Oklo field the only natural nuclear reactor on Earth. The natural reactor, which appeared 1.8 billion years ago and burned for 500 thousand years, burned out, the ore is a decay product. Everyone sighed with relief - there was one less riddle on Earth.
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Alternative point of view
But not all conference participants made such a decision. A number of scientists called it far-fetched, not withstanding any criticism. They relied on the opinion of the great Enrico Fermi, the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, who always argued that a chain reaction can only be artificial - too many factors must coincide by chance. Any mathematician will say that the probability of this is so small that it can be unambiguously equated to zero.
But if this suddenly happened and the stars, as they say, converged, then a self-controlled nuclear reaction for 500 thousand years … At the NPP, several people watch the operation of the reactor around the clock, constantly changing the modes of its operation, preventing the reactor from stopping or exploding. The slightest mistake - and you will get Chernobyl or Fukushima. And in Oklo, for half a million years, everything worked by itself?
Most stable version
Those who disagree with the version of a natural nuclear reactor in a Gabonese mine put forward their theory according to which the reactor in Oklo is a creation of the mind. However, the mine in Gabon looks less like a nuclear reactor built by a high-tech civilization. However, the alternatives do not insist on this. In their opinion, the mine in Gabon was a burial place for spent nuclear fuel.
For this purpose, the site was chosen and prepared ideally: for half a million years from the basalt "sarcophagus" not a single gram of radioactive substance has penetrated into the environment.
The theory that the Oklo mine is a nuclear repository is technically a far better fit than the "natural reactor" version. But closing some questions, she asks new ones. After all, if there was a repository with spent nuclear fuel, then there was also a reactor from which this waste was brought. Where did he go? And where did the civilization itself disappear, which built the burial ground?
Author Klim Podkova