Mounana · GA

Oklo Natural Nuclear Reactor

In the dense forests of southeastern Gabon lies the only place on Earth where nature built a nuclear reactor — roughly 1.8 billion years before humans split the atom for the first time. The Oklo Natural Nuclear Reactor is not a single machine but a series of fossilised reaction zones buried within the uranium-rich sandstone of the Franceville Basin, where groundwater, high-grade ore, and a younger planet's more abundant fissile isotope combined to ignite a self-sustaining chain reaction that pulsed for hundreds of thousands of years. Discovered in 1972 when French scientists at a uranium enrichment plant noticed impossibly low concentrations of uranium-235 in ore samples from the Oklo mine, the site has become one of the most celebrated geological phenomena in the world — a natural proof that nuclear fission preceded humankind by eons, and a living laboratory for understanding how radioactive waste remains locked in rock for billions of years.