 -- far faster than the snail's-pace processes that would be characteristic of the natural reactors.
Herndon received his bachelor's degree in physics at UC San Diego in 1970. He studied nuclear chemistry and meteorites in graduate school at Texas A&M, where he received his doctoral degree for a thesis on meteorites. Operating as an independent scientist, over the years, he has published papers in prestigious journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. His main allies are non-Americans, like the de Meijer team. On Dec. 16, Herndon is scheduled to deliver the prestigious annual "Christmas Lecture" at the European Commission's Institute for Transuranium Elements in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is felt that the huge antinuclear bias in American society is preventing other U.S. academics from getting on board, as they might lose tenure positions or funding by bucking the strong academic antinuke culture on this issue. Had his two sons -- now physicians -- planned to become scientists, he says, "I would have steered them away from it because you can't make a living and do legitimate science; you have to 'howl with the wolves' or you don't survive. This is a sad testament to our times. There's something very wrong in American science."
According to traditional theory, the core of Earth consists of iron. The SanDiego scientist J. Marvin Herndon has argued that a large deposit of uranium also exists in the core, where it powers a natural nuclear reactor or “georeactor.” Herndon believes the nuclear process is responsible for variations in the intensity of Earth’s magnetic field.
During the radioactive decays, the georeactor releases ghostly particles called antineutrinos, which fly through thousands of miles of solid rock to Earth’s surface. Scientists will test Herndon’s georeactor by using special instruments to detect the antineutrinos as they pass through the outer crust.
Sources: nuclearplanet.com; www.ansto.gov.au/edu/about/about_neutron.htm;
Other scientists have expanded Herndon's proposal to include Thorium and Potassium.
Why is the earth's core so hot? And how do scientists measure its temperature?
Mount Vernon, Ohio
Quentin Williams, associate professor of earth sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz offers this explanation:
There are three main sources of heat in the deep earth: (1) heat from when the planet formed and accreted, which has not yet been lost; (2) frictional heating, caused by denser core material sinking to the center of the planet; and (3) heat from the decay of radioactive elements.
It takes a rather long time for heat to move out of the earth. This occurs through both "convective" transport of heat within the earth's liquid outer core and solid mantle and slower "conductive" transport of heat through nonconvecting boundary layers, such as the earth's plates at the surface. As a result, much of the planet's primordial heat, from when the earth first accreted and developed its core, has been retained.
The amount of heat that can arise through simple accretionary processes, bringing small bodies together to form the proto-earth, is large: on the order of 10,000 kelvins (about 18,000 degrees Farhenheit). The crucial issue is how much of that energy was deposited into the growing earth and how much was reradiated into space. Indeed, the currently accepted idea for how the moon was formed involves the impact or accretion of a Mars-size object with or by the proto-earth. When two objects of this size collide, large amounts of heat are generated, of which quite a lot is retained. This single episode could have largely melted the outermost several thousand kilometers of the planet.
Additionally, descent of the dense iron-rich material that makes up the core of the planet to the center would produce heating on the order of 2,000 kelvins (about 3,000 degrees F). The magnitude of the third main source of heat--radioactive heating--is large, but quantitatively uncertain. The precise abundances of radioactive elements (prima