The important note about that Okla Reactor is that it is believed to have used groundwater as an element in the system. If the moon has a similar naturally occurring fission reactor it would either mean that there is water on the moon or that it uses a novel mechanism
Could someone explain why this comment was killed dead? From the wiki page:
> The natural nuclear reactor formed when a uranium-rich mineral deposit became inundated with groundwater, which could act as a moderator for the neutrons produced by nuclear fission.
There would need to be something to moderate it on the moon, if it were a reaction like this, correct? Is there some well known mechanism on the moon?
Regardless, the lack of water, for the granite, is actually pointed out in the OP article. So, missing water is an interesting aspect of this:
> “Now we need the geologists to figure out how you can produce that kind of feature on the moon without water, without plate tectonics,” Dr. Siegler said.
> Liquid Water: 4–3.5 billion years ago, the Moon could have had sufficient atmosphere and liquid water on its surface.
Hence my ?joke? about the lunar nuclear reactor, 3.5 billion years ago. A figure which is in the NYT article:
> A more recent analysis led by Katherine Shirley, now at the University of Oxford in England, estimated the age of the volcano at 3.5 billion years old.
Original paper: Evidence of new volcanic process on Moon https://psi.edu/news/lunarvolcanoessiegler (includes map of the hotspot) Basically it's a big blob of granite with a lot of hot thorium in it.
> To produce that much heat and the thorium gamma-rays, Dr. Siegler, Dr. Feng and the other researchers concluded that...
...the buried fission reactor was about 3.5 billion years old...
/j? The Oklo Reactor (in Gabon, Africa) is real, and was "operational" ~1.7 billion years ago. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine )