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Text Chapter 1334 Ancient Nuclear Energy

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    In some of the blocked knowledge, even Feiyi is now qualified to access the contents of super-ancient civilizations. These advanced civilizations that appeared before the written history of this era have always been mysterious existences.

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    This so-called historical common sense is just a concept instilled in textbooks and does not represent absolute truth.  There are still many incredible things on the earth, left over from ancient times, which shock today's human beings incomparably.  Smart Factory 1334

    The first one is the nuclear reactor. This reactor has been used for 500,000 years. Two billion years ago, more than a dozen natural nuclear reactors were mysteriously started, steadily outputting energy, and operating safely for hundreds of thousands of years.

    Why didn¡¯t they destroy themselves in the explosion?  Who ensures the safe operation of these nuclear reactions?  Through detailed analysis of the ruins, the truth about ancient nuclear reactors is becoming more and more clearly exposed to us.

    In May 1962, a worker at a nuclear fuel processing plant in the Chinese Federation noticed a strange phenomenon.  He was conducting routine analysis on a piece of uranium ore mined from a seemingly ordinary uranium mine.

    Like all natural uranium ores, the ore contains three uranium isotopes¡ªin other words, the uranium element exists in three different forms with different atomic weights. The most abundant is uranium-238, and the rarest is uranium-238.  It's uranium-234.

    And people are coveting the isotope that can sustain the nuclear chain reaction, which is uranium-235.  Almost everywhere on Earth, even on the moon or in meteorites, the ratio of the number of atoms of the uranium-235 isotope to the total amount of uranium is always 0.720.

    However, in these ore samples mined from Gabon, Africa, the content of uranium 235 is only 0.717!

    Although the difference is so subtle, it has aroused the vigilance of Chinese Federation scientists. Something strange must have happened.  Further analysis showed that part of the ore mined from the mine contained a serious shortage of uranium-235, with about 200 kilograms missing.

    Don¡¯t underestimate these two hundred grams, this is enough to make 6 atomic bombs!

    For weeks, experts at the Hualien Atomic Energy Commission were puzzled.  It wasn't until someone suddenly remembered a theoretical prediction 19 years ago that everyone suddenly realized it.

    In 1953, George W. Wetherill of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Mark G. Ingram of the University of Chicago pointed out that some uranium ore veins may have once formed natural nuclear fission reactors. This idea quickly became popular.  stand up.

    Soon afterwards, Kazuo Kuroda, a chemist at the University of Arkansas in the United States, calculated the conditions for uranium ore to spontaneously produce a "self-sustaining fission reaction."  The so-called self-sustaining fission reaction, that is, a nuclear fission reaction that can be sustained spontaneously, starts from an accidental intrusion of a neutron.

    During the reaction, it will induce a uranium-235 nucleus to split, and the fission will produce more neutrons, which will trigger other nuclei to continue splitting, and so on, forming a chain reaction.

    Kazuo Kuroda, a Japanese nuclear physicist who has joined the Chinese Federation, believes that the first condition for a self-sustaining fission reaction to occur is that the size of the uranium ore vein must exceed the average distance that fission-inducing neutrons travel through the ore, which is about 0.67 meters.  .

    This condition can ensure that the neutrons released by the fission nucleus can be absorbed by other uranium nuclei before escaping from the vein.

    The second necessary condition is that uranium-235 must be abundant enough.  Today, even the largest and most concentrated uranium veins cannot be used as a nuclear reactor because the concentration of uranium-235 is too low, not even 1.

    But this isotope is radioactive and decays about six times faster than uranium-238, so the proportion of this more easily decayed isotope must have been much higher in the distant past.

    For example, when the Okro uranium veins were formed 2 billion years ago, the proportion of uranium-235 was close to 3, which is roughly the same concentration as the artificially purified enriched uranium fuel used in most nuclear power plants today.

    The third important factor is that there must be some kind of neutron "moderator" to slow down the movement speed of the neutrons released when the uranium nucleus fission, so that these neutrons can more easily induce the split of the uranium nucleus.

    Ultimately, the veins cannot contain large amounts of boron, lithium or other "toxins" that would absorb neutrons and thus bring any nuclear fission reaction to a screeching halt.  Smart Factory 1334

    Researchers identified 16 separate areas in uranium deposits in Okro and neighboring Okrobando areas.  Two billion years ago, the real environment there was actually the same as the black?The general situation described by Kazuo is surprisingly similar.

    Although these areas were all identified decades ago, the details of how the ancient nuclear reactors operated were only recently revealed by my colleagues and me.

    The light elements produced by the splitting of heavy elements provide conclusive evidence that a self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction did occur in the Okro uranium mine 2 billion years ago, and it lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.

    Soon after the uranium anomaly at Okro was discovered, physicists determined that natural fission reactions were causing the loss of uranium-235.  When a heavy atomic nucleus splits in two, new, lighter elements are created.  Finding these elements would be tantamount to finding conclusive evidence of nuclear fission.

    ¡°It turns out that the levels of these fission products are so high that any explanation other than a nuclear chain reaction is impossible.  This chain reaction is very similar to the famous demonstration performed by Enrico Fermi and his colleagues in 1942.

    Because Guwenhui and the Huaxia Federation concealed the progress of China's nuclear physics technology at that time, the two men built the world's first controllable nuclear fission chain reactor. The reaction relied entirely on their own power to maintain operation, but it was 20 years ahead of schedule.  Billions of years.

    Shortly after the announcement of such a shocking discovery, physicists around the world began studying evidence of these natural nuclear reactors and shared their knowledge of the "Okro phenomenon" at a special conference in Libreville, Gabon, in 1975.  research results.

    The next year, George A. Cowan, who represented the United States at that conference, wrote an article for Scientific American, "138 Readings, 138 Readings, Scientists at the Time Speculated on the Operating Principles of These Ancient Nuclear Reactors."

    By the way, he is one of the founders of the famous Santa Fe Institute in the United States and is still a member of the institute.

    For example, Cowan described the formation process of plutonium-239. The more abundant uranium-238 captures some of the neutrons released by the fission of uranium-235, transforming it into uranium-239, and then releases two electrons, which are transformed into plutonium-239.

    In the Okro uranium mine, more than two tons of plutonium-239 were once produced.  However, almost all of this isotope disappeared later.  Mainly through natural radioactive decay, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. Some plutonium itself also undergoes fission, as evidenced by its unique fission products.

    The rich content of these light elements has led scientists to speculate that the fission reaction must have continued for hundreds of thousands of years.  Based on the amount of uranium-235 consumed, they calculated the total energy released by the reactor, which is roughly equivalent to the energy consumed by running a 15-gigawatt machine for an entire year.

    Combined with some other evidence, the average output power of the reactor can be calculated: no more than 100 kilowatts, enough to maintain the operation of dozens of ovens.

    It is truly amazing that more than a dozen natural reactors have worked spontaneously and maintained moderate power output for hundreds of thousands of years.  Why didn't these veins explode and destroy themselves as soon as the nuclear chain reaction started?

    What mechanism gives them the essential self-regulation ability?  Are these reactors operating steadily, or do they have intermittent bursts?

    Since the Okro phenomenon was first discovered, these questions have remained unanswered.  In fact, the last question has puzzled people for 30 years. It was not until he and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis tested a piece of ore from this mysterious African uranium mine that the answer was gradually revealed.

    In the remains of the Okro reactor, the composition ratio of xenon isotopes is abnormal.  Finding the source of this anomaly could reveal the mystery of how ancient nuclear reactors worked.

    Recently, scientists studied the remains of a reactor in Okro, focusing on the analysis of xenon gas.  Xenon is a heavier noble gas that can be trapped in minerals for billions of years.

    There are 9 stable isotopes of xenon, which are produced by different nuclear reaction processes and have different contents.  As a noble gas, it has difficulty forming chemical bonds with other elements, so they can be easily purified for isotope analysis.

    The content of xenon is so rare that scientists can use it to detect and trace nuclear reactions, and even to study nuclear reactions that occurred in primitive meteorites before the formation of the solar system.

    Analysis of the isotopic composition of xenon requires a mass spectrometer, which can separate different atoms according to their different atomic weights.  I was fortunate to have access to an extremely accurate xenon mass spectrometer built by Charles M. Hornberg at the University of Washington.

    But before using his instrument, scientists must first extract the xenon gas from the sample.  Typically, scientists only have to heat the host mineral above its melting point, and the rock loses its crystal structure and can no longer retain the xenon stored within.  Smart Factory 1334

    To learn more about the origin and origin of this gasTo save information about the process, scientists used a more sophisticated method, namely laser extraction, which can release xenon gas from individual particles of mineral samples in a targeted manner without touching other surrounding parts.  .

    The only fragment of Okro ore available to these scientists was only 1 millimeter thick and 4 millimeters wide, and we applied this technique to many tiny spots on the fragment.  Of course, we first need to decide where to focus the laser beam.

    In this effort, Cowan and Hornberg were assisted by their colleague Olga Pravdivcheva, who took a detailed X-ray photo of the sample and identified the candidate minerals.

    After each extraction, Cowan and his colleagues would purify the resulting gas, and then put the xenon gas into Hornberger's mass spectrometer, which would display the number of atoms of each isotope.

    The location of xenon gas surprised everyone. It was not distributed in large quantities among uranium-rich mineral particles as originally imagined. The largest amount of xenon gas stored turned out to be aluminum phosphate particles that did not contain uranium at all.

    ¡°It¡¯s very clear that these particles have the highest concentration of xenon of any natural mineral found so far.  The second surprise was that the extracted gases had a markedly different isotopic composition than those normally produced by nuclear reactions.

    Nuclear fission will definitely produce xenon-136 and xenon-134, but in Okro ore, these two isotopes seem to be seriously missing, while the content of other lighter xenon isotopes has not changed much.

    How does this difference in isotope composition ratio arise?  Chemical reactions cannot provide the answer because all isotopes have exactly the same chemical properties.  So can nuclear reactions, such as the neutron capture process, be explained?

    After careful analysis, Cowan and his colleagues ruled out this possibility.  They also considered the physical sorting process of different isotopes: heavier atoms move slightly slower than lighter atoms, and sometimes they become separated from each other.

    Uranium enrichment devices use this process to produce reactor fuel, but it requires a very high level of technology to build such industrial equipment.  Even if nature could miraculously create similar "devices" on a microscopic scale, it would still not explain the ratio of xenon isotopes mixed together in the aluminum phosphate particles we studied.

    For example, if physical sorting did occur, the absence of xenon-136 should be twice that of xenon-134 (which is 2 atomic mass units heavier than xenon-132), given the existing xenon-132 content.  But in reality, no such pattern is seen.

    After racking their brains, Cowan and the others finally figured out the reason for the abnormal composition ratio of xenon isotopes.  None of the xenon isotopes it measured were direct products of uranium fission.  Instead, they are the product of the decay of radioactive iodine isotopes. Iodine is produced by the decay of radioactive tellurium, which in turn is produced by the decay of other elements. This is a famous nuclear reaction sequence, and the final product is stable xenon gas.

    The breakthrough came when nuclear physicists like Cowan realized that the different xenon isotopes in the Okro sample were produced at different times, following a schedule determined by the half-lives of their parent element iodine and the element that preceded it, tellurium.  .

    The longer certain radioactive precursors exist, the longer their formation of xenon is delayed.

    For example, xenon-136 begins to be produced only about a minute after Okro's self-sustaining fission reaction begins.  An hour later, the slightly lighter stable isotope xenon-134 appeared.

    Next, a few days after the fission began, xenon-132 and xenon-131 appeared; finally, several million years later, xenon-129 was formed.  At this time, the nuclear chain reaction had stopped for a long time.

    ¡°If the Okro vein had remained closed, the xenon gas that had accumulated during the operation of its natural reactor would have maintained the normal isotope ratio produced by nuclear fission and has been preserved to this day.

    ¡°However, scientists have no reason to believe that this system will be closed.  In fact, there are good reasons to suppose that it is not closed.  The simple fact that the Okro reactor can somehow regulate nuclear reactions on its own provides indirect evidence.

    The most likely regulatory mechanism is related to the activity of groundwater: when the temperature reaches a certain critical point, the water will be boiled and evaporated.  Water acts as a neutron moderator in the nuclear chain reaction. If the water is missing, the nuclear chain reaction will temporarily stop.  Only when the temperature drops and enough groundwater seeps in again will fission continue to occur in the reaction zone.

    This account of how the Okro reactor operates highlights two important points.  First, nuclear reactions are likely to occur intermittently in some way.  Second, there must be a lot of water flowing through these rocks, enough to wash away some of the xenon precursors, such as water-soluble tellurium and?.

    The presence of water helps explain why most xenon is now found in aluminum phosphate particles and not in uranium-rich minerals.

    "You know, this is where the fission reaction originally created those radioactive precursors, and xenon doesn't simply migrate from one set of pre-existing minerals to another.

    ¡°It¡¯s likely that the aluminum phosphate mineral didn¡¯t exist before the Okro reactor started operating.  In fact, those aluminum phosphate particles may have formed in situ once the water heated by the nuclear reaction cooled to around 300¡ãC.

    During each active period of Okro reactor operation and subsequent periods when temperatures are still high, large amounts of xenon are driven away.  As the reactor cools down, the xenon precursor, which has a longer half-life, preferentially binds to the forming aluminum phosphate particles.  As more water returns to the reaction zone, the neutrons are appropriately slowed down, and the fission reaction resumes, causing this cycle of heating and cooling to repeat itself over and over again.

    The result is the strange xenon isotope composition we observe.

    What force can allow xenon gas to remain in aluminum phosphate minerals for 2 billion years?  Furthermore, why is the xenon produced during one reactor operation not removed during the next operation?

    We don¡¯t have definite answers to these questions yet.  It is speculated that xenon may be trapped in a cage-like structure of the aluminum phosphate mineral, which is capable of holding the xenon gas generated in the cage even at very high temperatures.

    Although the specific details are still unclear, regardless of the final answer, one thing is clear, aluminum phosphate's ability to capture xenon is truly amazing.

    ?? Ancient nuclear reactors are like today¡¯s geysers, with a very perfect self-regulating mechanism.  They have provided human scientists with new ideas in nuclear waste disposal and basic physics research.

    However, the internal research of the Ancient Literature Society shows that the possibility of such a situation occurring in nature is extremely slim, and science does not believe in coincidence. Therefore, such a perfect nuclear reaction method is more like a relic left by a super-ancient civilization.
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