“What is Earth? Poets say it’s a celestial sapphire, a cerulean orb. Astronomers say it’s a medium-size planet orbiting an average star. Some environmentalists say it’s Mother. Biologists say it’s life’s only known home. But the most scientifically precise definition may prove to be the one that no one suspected. Earth, says geophysicist J. Marvin Herndon, is a gigantic natural nuclear power plant.”--- Brad Lemley, author of Nuclear Planet, the cover story of the August 2002 issue of Discover Magazine, please click here.

A Brief and Personal Overview
--- by J. Marvin Herndon, Ph.D. © 2002, 2003

Early in 1939, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann published in Naturwissenschaften their discovery of nuclear fission, the splitting of the nucleus of uranium atoms. Later in the same year and in the same journal, Siegfried Flügge speculated on the possibility of nuclear fission chain reactions occurring in nature.

As the clouds of World War II darkened over Europe and the rest of the world, interest in nuclear fission focused upon the design and production of nuclear fission devices (atom bombs). After the war, attention focused upon commercial nuclear electric power production and nuclear submarine propulsion. Little attention was directed to nuclear fission in nature.

In 1956, Paul Kuroda published a short paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics demonstrating the feasibility that thick seams of uranium ore might, 2,000 million years ago, have been able to support chain reactions and function as natural nuclear reactors. Kuroda later told me that he was able to get the paper published only because at the time that journal would accept short papers without reviewer comments.

In 1972, scientists at the French Atomic Energy Establishment discovered the intact remains of a natural nuclear reactor in a seam of uranium ore at a mine at Oklo in the Republic of Gabon in western Africa. The French immediately contacted Kuroda, who immediately contacted his former students, one of them being my Ph.D. thesis advisor who told his own students about the natural reactor. I was fortunate to learn so early about the Oklo discovery.

In 1990, my attention was directed to the planet Jupiter. Astronomers had discovered in the late 1960s that Jupiter radiates about twice as much energy as it receives from the sun. Planetary scientists, erroneously believing they had considered and eliminated all possible energy sources, declared that by "default" or "by elimination" the excess energy must be gravitational energy released when the planet formed some 4,500 million years ago.  But that explanation did not make sense to me. Jupiter is 98% hydrogen and helium, both of which are extremely efficient heat transfer media. Then I realized that Jupiter has all of the ingredients necessary for a planetary-scale nuclear fission reactor. In 1992, I published a paper in Naturwissenschaften on nuclear fission reactors as energy sources for the giant outer planets.

Soon I realized that hydrogen to slow neutrons was not necessary for a planetary reactor; that observation opened the door to the possibility of a nuclear fission reactor at the center of the Earth. In 1993, I published a paper in the Journal of Geomagnetism and Geoelectricity on the feasibility of a nuclear fission reactor as the energy source for the geomagnetic field. Subsequently, I extended the concept with publications in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

For more than thirty years, scientists and engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed and tested computer programs to simulate numerically different types of nuclear reactors. My research took a major step forward when Daniel Hollenbach showed me that those programs would be applicable to a deep-Earth nuclear reactor. We published the results in 2001 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The numerical simulations not only confirmed my previous calculations, but additionally gave us the amounts of the various products of fission. The helium results, which agree with what is found in deep-source lavas, such as Hawaii and Iceland, provide the first strong, direct evidence for a nuclear reactor at the center of the Earth.

Recently, the folks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory graciously made additional, extended and refined georeactor numerical simulations. I published those results in 2003 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. That paper presents extremely strong evidence of the nuclear georeactor origin of oceanic basalt helium and strong evidence that the end of the lifetime of the georeactor is approaching.

This overview is but a brief introduction; between the lines there is a richness of detail to be found by exploring NuclearPlanet.com and other sources. Enjoy

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