Hacker Neue

Preferences
foobarian parent
> All natural uranium today contains 0.720% of U-235. If you were to extract it from the Earth’s crust, or from rocks from the moon or in meteorites, that’s what you would find. But that bit of rock from Oklo contained only 0.717%.

Heh. The garbage web software developer me would have just called it good enough

Would be really interesting to know what the error bars on those figures look like

teuobk
Per NIST[1], the value is 0.7204% +/- 0.0006%, with the uncertainty representing one standard deviation.

[1] https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/Compositions/stand_alone.pl...

Analemma_
I think it would've been good enough for the miners too, if not for the fact that nuclear arms control treaties require every gram of U-235 to be accounted for. When they were digging it out of the ground and found it was less enriched than it should've been, this needed to be explained. It has always fascinated me to think that this natural phenomenon could and probably would have remained unknown forever if not for these treaties and agreements.
mannykannot
You have me wondering about that as well. If the uranium was going to be enriched for use in a light-water reactor (I would guess it was), maybe the difference translates into needing more stages of enrichment to reach the required level?

This item has no comments currently.