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Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)

Physicist Francis Perrin sat at a nuclearfuel-processing plant down in the south of France, thinking to himself: “This cannot be possible.” It was 1972.

For such a phenomenon to have happened naturally, these uranium deposits in western Equatorial Africa must have had to contain a critical mass of U-235 to start the reaction. “Like in a man-made light-water nuclear reactor, the fission reactions, without anything to slow down the neutrons, to moderate them, simply stop,” said Peter Woods, team leader in charge of uranium production at the IAEA. Experts suspect there may have been other such natural reactors in the world, but these must have been destroyed by geological processes, eroded away or subducted — or simply not yet found.

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