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Natural Nuclear Fission Reactor

wikipedia.org

60 pointsbo0tzz16 comments

I had heard about the natural reactor before, but this Wikipedia article was my first exposure to the hypothesis that the Moon originated from an explosion in a natural fission reactor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

It's hogwash. The moon would not have sprung off into earth orbit.

It would have exited the solar system and be flung out across the galaxy starring Martin Landau and Barbara Bain.

How could such a reactor explode? I thought you need pretty high pressure to get a chain reaction for an explosion.

Explosion isn't the real difficulty imho. Even if there was an explosion sufficient to loft a moon's worth of material into space, how did it obtain sufficient orbital velocity to stay in space?

An explosion big enough to crack the planet into two chunks is one thing, the series of carefully timed explosions necessary to start those chunks spinning nicely around each other is totally different.

If earth was already spinning, then an explosion that splits earth's core into two chunks would end up with those chunks orbiting round eachother.

The resulting spin of each chunk can depend on the location of the explosion in the pre-explosion earth.

If you have the fission happening surrounded by rock, it can indeed get to very high temperatures and pressure, and after the rock gives and the hot material comes in contact with water, pressure will rise very rapidly.

Well, tell me comrade, how could it explode?

That's impossible! You are wrong!

What leads you to believe that high pressure could not be reached?

I wonder to what extent mutations produced by the radiation from this reactor accelerated the evolution of life.

It was first discussed here today in the context of fungu using radio synthesis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342750

Most background radiation comes from Potassium and Radon: I'm not sure how much of an impact this one reactor might have had.

If there were an "optimal" amount of radiation for evolution at particular stages, you could imagine that this reactor, which offers a spectrum of radiation from "really bad" to "optimal" to "background" (depending on distance) would be useful. Lifeforms at the optimal distance from the reactor would evolve at a greater rate.

Origin of the Moon hypothesis section is awesome.

I read about this years ago and my first thought was, are there any lifeforms using this power in some way?

The radiosynthesis fungi seem to do so, haha

Oklo was critical 1.7B years ago. Definitely no fungi.

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