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[cdn-nucl-l] Is there a five-mile-wide ball of hellaciously hot uranium seething at the center of the Earth?
Posted in Discover Magazine in the August 2002 issue, abstract at:
http://www.discover.com/aug_02/featplanet.html
More about the idea at:
http://www.davidicke.net/emagazine/vol5/nuclear.html
Adam
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Nuclear Planet
Is there a five-mile-wide ball of hellaciously hot uranium seething at
the center of the Earth?
By Brad Lemley
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. We live on its thick shield,
while 4,000 miles below our feet a five-mile-wide ball of uranium burns,
churns, and reacts, creating the planet's magnetic field as well as the
heat that powers volcanoes and continental-plate movements. Herndon's
theory boldly contradicts the view that has dominated geophysics since
the 1940s: that Earth's inner core is a huge ball of partially
crystallized iron and nickel, slowly cooling and growing as it
surrenders heat into a fluid core. Radioactivity, in this model, is just
a supplementary heat source, with widely dispersed isotopes decaying on
their own, not concentrated.
Full text of this article can be found in the current issue of Discover
Magazine.
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RELATED WEB SITES:
For more information about J. Marvin Herndon's theory, write to
mherndon@san.rr.com. And to read about the natural fission reactions
found in Africa, check out www.curtin.edu.au/
curtin/centre/waisrc/OKLO/index.shtml.
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