Isabelle Boemeke

So there is this big uranium reserve in Africa, in what is now called Gabon in Africa.

And some French nuclear power plants were buying uranium from that region.

And, you know, because uranium is highly regulated and so on, they have to measure everything and make sure everything looks good when they receive shipments of uranium.

And they noticed that this uranium was slightly less radioactive than it should have been.

It's a very simple way of putting it.

And they were concerned that somewhere along the way, people had stolen uranium.

So a bunch of scientists went to this uranium deposit in Gabon in Africa and started analyzing the uranium chunks and the rocks and

And they started realizing that all the uranium from that mine was, quote unquote, less radioactive than it should have been.

And then they started detecting so-called fission products, which is basically what you find in nuclear waste.

And that's how they realized...

that those uranium deposits 2 billion years ago had actually been natural nuclear reactors.

Just the conditions of the place were such that whenever it rained and the water pooled in the cave, it allowed for chain reactions to happen.

That water would get hot and would then evaporate and it would stop until it rained again.

So for hundreds of thousands of years, these caves served as natural nuclear reactors.

If we were to go back in time and stick

Let's take a steam generator and a turbine.

We could have actually made electricity with them.

Isn't that so cool?

Yeah, so definitely nuclear waste is one of the biggest concerns that people have.

And I totally get it.