The site is underwater now. They flooded it. A little hard to go back and check the claims. The story of Oklo though does include the following claims.
"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.
1[so they assume that differences existed..proof?]
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,
2
["Must have"??? Prove it]
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
3[so we need water every few hours for millions of years?]
Cowan described, for example, how
some of the neutrons released during the
fission of uranium 235 were captured by
the more abundant uranium 238, which
became uranium 239 and, after emitting
two electrons,
turned into plutonium
239.
4[after being kissed by the tooth fairy?][prove there was a same state past and the great time needed first]
Although almost all this
material, which has a 24,000-year halflife,
has since
disappeared (primarily
through natural radioactive decay),
5[ah, the case of the missing stuff-prove it was ever really here -they can't]
The
abundance of those lighter elements allowed
scientists to deduce that fission
reactions 'must have' gone on for hundreds
of thousands of years.
6
[missing stuff forces same state past conclusion!]
From the
amount of uranium 235 'consumed',
[i.e. missing!] they
calculated the total energy released,
15,000 megawatt-years, and from this
and other evidence were able to 'work out'
the average power output,
7
[present state calculations][if the missing stuff existed it would have taken so many eons to disapear]
It is truly amazing that more than a
dozen natural reactors spontaneously
sprang into existence and that they managed
to maintain a modest power output
for perhaps a few hundred millennia.
8
[truly amazing indeed] [prove it]
Xenon
is extremely rare, which allows scientists
to use it to detect and trace nuclear
reactions, even those that occurred in
primitive meteorites before the solar system
came into existence.
To analyze the isotopic composition
9
[attribute all this gas to same state causes...absurd][as mentioned the whole site is underwater now, no one can recheck work]
We applied this technique to many
tiny spots on our
lone available fragment
of Oklo rock, only one millimeter thick
and four
millimeters across.
10
[all this fable based on a teensy fragment. wow]
The second epiphany was that the extracted
gas had a significantly different
isotopic makeup from what is usually
produced in nuclear reactors.
11
[so there was a difference...from what we now see]
'seemingly' lost a large portion of the xenon
136 and 134 that would 'certainly'
have been created from fission, whereas
the lighter varieties of the element were
modified to a lesser extent.
12
[large amount of missing stuff that golly gee must have created actual stuff]
For example,
measured with respect to the
amount of xenon 132 present, the depletion
of xenon 136 (being four atomicmass
units heavier) would have been
twice that of xenon 134 (two atomic mass
units heavier) if physical sorting had operated.
We did not see that pattern.
13
[IF physical sorting of the present kind existed...who says it did? so now we need to look at sorting in the former state as a possible cause rather than reaction]
None of the xenon isotopes
we measured were the direct result
of uranium fission. Rather they were the
products of the decay of radioactive isotopes
of iodine, which in turn were
formed from radioactive tellurium and
so forth, according to a well-known sequence
of nuclear reactions that gives
rise to stable xenon.
14 [this became that and that became this and on and on in a same state dream fest]
xenon
136 began at Oklo only about a
minute after the onset of self-sustained
fi ssion. An hour later the next lighter
stable isotope, xenon 134, appeared.
Then, some days after the start of fission,
xenon 132 and 131 came on the
scene. Finally,
after millions of years,
and well after the nuclear chain reactions
terminated, xenon 129 formed.
15 [woulda coulda]
The
most likely mechanism involves the action
of groundwater, which presumably
'boiled away' after the temperature
reached some critical level.
16[same state speculation][any proof that a river ran through it that long geologically?]
very likely they pulsed
on and off in some fashion, and large
quantities of water 'must have' been moving
through these rocks—enough to
wash away some of the xenon precursors,
tellurium and iodine, which are
water-soluble.
17[large quantities of water must have...must have ..must have...same state religion][not claimed because we know water did exist at this spot...but because they need it to have]
another—it is
unlikely that aluminum phosphate minerals
were present before the Oklo reactors
began operating.
18[says who?]['billions of imaginary years ago before the reactors started, some stuff must have existed]
Instead those
grains of aluminum phosphate 'probably'
formed in place through the action of the
nuclear-heated water, once it had cooled
to about 300 degrees Celsius.
19[speculation in the extreme]
During each active period of operation
of an Oklo reactor and for some
time afterward, while the temperature
remained high, much of the xenon gas
(including xenon 136 and 134, which
were generated relatively quickly) was
'driven off'.
20[missing stuff again with same state beliefs][in this case the stuff was 'driven off' ha]
incorporated into growing grains of aluminum
phosphate.
21[remember they said it was unlikely that aluminum was there before the 'reactions' they don't really know]
Then, as
more water
returned to the reaction zone, neutrons
became properly moderated and fission
once again
resumed, allowing the cycle
of heating and cooling to repeat. The result
was the peculiar segregation of xenon
isotopes we uncovered.
22[The result of what? The result of the water they imagine 'HAD to' be there for millenia and in the right time and amount]
It is
not entirely obvious what forces
kept this xenon inside the aluminum
phosphate minerals for almost
half the
planet’s lifetime. In particular, why was
the xenon generated during a given operational
pulse not driven off during the
next one?
23[GIANT leap of faith]
Presumably it became imprisoned
in the cagelike structure of the aluminum
phosphate minerals, which were
able to hold on to the xenon gas created
within them, even at high temperatures.
The
details remain fuzzy, but
whatever
the final answers are, one thing is clear:
the capacity of aluminum phosphate
24[WTF?]
The Oklo reactor
we studied had switched “on” for 30 minutes
and “off” for at least 2.5 hours.
[for eons]
. The more
important lessons may be about how to
handle nuclear waste. Oklo, after all,
serves as a good analogue for a long-term
geologic repository,
25 [dangerous false prophesy]
The Oklo reactors may also teach scientists
about possible shifts in what was
formerly thought to be a fundamental
physical constant, one called (alpha),
which controls such universal quantities
as the speed of light [see “Inconstant
Constants,” by John D. Barrow and John
K. Webb; Scientifi c American, June].
26
[fables like Oklo form basis of alpha now?]
For three decades, the two-billion-year old
Oklo phenomenon has been used to
argue against alpha having changed. But last
year Steven K. Lamoreaux and Justin R.
Torgerson of Los Alamos National Laboratory
drew on Oklo to posit that this
“constant” has, in fact, varied signifi -
cantly (and, strangely enough, in the opposite
sense from what others have recently
proposed).
27 [so - opposite now of what they said then]
-------- this was from old notes,
The Workings of an Ancient Nuclear Reactor
I could also dig up where they claimed the site was miles under if you like. Then it came back to the surface.
Then there is the interesting fact that Cowan was in the Manhattan Project if I recall. I think he presided over different groups of people who knew nothing of each others work, so he is used to intrigue.
