Brian Cory Dobbs

Everything was fine.

I asked...

This sounded all crazy to me.

I know how this sounds.

I had to get to the bottom of this.

So I asked Steve Bogalski, who is a nuclear weapons expert at Georgia Tech, hey, have you heard of the xenon anomaly on Mars?

And he's like, yeah, I heard about it.

It's probably just natural.

And he provided a natural explanation for... He provided a natural nuclear reaction example that happened here on Earth.

And in the country of Gabon, millions of years ago...

Water seeped into a uranium mine or uranium deposit here on Earth and started a natural nuclear reaction.

It kind of fizzled out.

Nothing much really came of it.

But when we were excavating things in this mine in Gabon, we sort of came across all this and discovered all this and they figured all this out.

But not all nuclear reactions are created equal.

Even a natural nuclear reaction such as that would not have produced xenon-129.

Power plants, okay?

It's not the same nuclear reaction as a thermonuclear weapon.

There's what's called R process and what's called S process.

R stands for rapid, S stands for slow, meaning how fast are the neutrons being absorbed into the nucleus of another atom, rapidly or slow.