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Nuclear Planet in DISCOVER

What a teaser!  I'm gonna run right out and buy a copy!



--Susan Gawarecki



DISCOVER Vol. 23 No. 8 (August 2002) 

Table of Contents 



Nuclear Planet - Is there a five-mile-wide ball of hellaciously hot

uranium seething at the center of the Earth? 

By Brad Lemley 



What is Earth? Poets say it's a celestial sapphire, a cerulean orb.

Astronomers say it's a medium-size planet orbiting an average star. Some

environmentalists say it's Mother. Biologists say it's life's only known

home. But the most scientifically precise definition may prove to be the

one that no one suspected.  Earth, says geophysicist J. Marvin Herndon,

is a gigantic natural nuclear power plant. We live on its thick shield,

while 4,000 miles below our feet a five-mile-wide ball of uranium burns,

churns, and reacts, creating the planet's magnetic field as well as the

heat that powers volcanoes and continental-plate movements. Herndon's

theory boldly contradicts the view that has dominated geophysics since

the 1940s: that Earth's inner core is a huge ball of partially

crystallized iron and nickel, slowly cooling and growing as it

surrenders heat into a fluid core. Radioactivity, in this model, is just

a supplementary heat source, with widely dispersed isotopes decaying on

their own, not concentrated. 



Full text of this article can be found in the current issue of Discover

Magazine.



RELATED WEB SITES:



For more information about J. Marvin Herndon's theory, write to

mherndon@san.rr.com. And to read about the natural fission reactions

found in Africa, check out

www.curtin.edu.au/curtin/centre/waisrc/OKLO/index.shtml. 

--

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