Abstract
Until recently, it was thought that chemical elements were synthesized only in stars. The discovery of the Oklo phenomenon1–6 in 1972 revealed, however, that there was a nuclear ‘fire’ on the Earth 1,700 Myr ago. We have now carried out a series of acid-leaching experiments on a sample of uranium ore from reactor zone no. 10 of the Oklo mines in Gabon, Africa, and observe anomalously high 234U/238U ratios accompanied by modestly increased 235U/238U ratios in uranium fractions. These results, which can be interpreted as being due to the α-recoil effects of 238U and 239Pu, provide a convenient way of calculating the conversion factor (or the fraction of uranium atoms converted to plutonium) of the natural reactors from radiochemical data, obviating the necessity for mass-spectrometric measurements.
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Sheng, Z., Kuroda, P. The α-recoil effects of uranium in the Oklo reactor. Nature 312, 535–536 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1038/312535a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/312535a0
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