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Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
21–30 of 124 posts
Re: Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
#22This article could be so much better: How large are the estimated stores of ore that underwent natural fission? How much energy did it release and over how much time? When? Would this be noticable (and to whom)? So many questions, so little information. I only know (or knew) high school physics, and when entering this in Claude I get an answer but am unable to verify the answer. Claude says 680 kWh gained per 0.03 gr…
Wikipedia is the best first point of entry, but if you do use Claude, just tell it to do web search for you: https://claude.ai/share/73e67582-3e03-454b-aa12-e8906bd7b3fd
Why not just do a web search?
Re: Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia is the best first point of entry, but if you do use Claude, just tell it to do web search for you: https://claude.ai/share/73e67582-3e03-454b-aa12-e8906bd7b3fd
Why not just do a web search?
I can't speak for users of Claude, but as a user of Perplexity, having an LLM do a web search has uncovered sources I'd never have considered. The only time I use Google anymore is when I know exactly what I'm looking for.
When I'm in research/discovery mode, I use Perplexity. Its search/analysis is a lot slower than a Google search, but saves me time overall and generally gives me solutions that I'd have to spend time sorting through a Google search to find, in less time than it takes to do so.
Re: Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
#24Maybe it’s a remnant from a nuclear ancient civilization.
Maybe it's a sign of a future time travelling civilization with nuclear power but poor navigation, warped straight into the mantle Earth's crust :D
Re: Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
#25Richard Rhodes brought this up in an interview. He made it a point for critics who say nuclear waste can't be safely disposed of through burial. Well, we have pretty good natural evidence that nuclear fission products can remain buried and undisturbed for a pretty long time!
Re: Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
#26Richard Rhodes brought this up in an interview. He made it a point for critics who say nuclear waste can't be safely disposed of through burial. Well, we have pretty good natural evidence that nuclear fission products can remain buried and undisturbed for a pretty long time!
This is nonsense. Yep, after 2 billion years this thing is now safe to touch. But that had nothing to do with it's burial.
We at least have pretty good evidence that nuclear fission products can be exposed to groundwater/hydrothermal fluids for a pretty long time.
Re: Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
#27This article could be so much better: How large are the estimated stores of ore that underwent natural fission? How much energy did it release and over how much time? When? Would this be noticable (and to whom)? So many questions, so little information. I only know (or knew) high school physics, and when entering this in Claude I get an answer but am unable to verify the answer. Claude says 680 kWh gained per 0.03 gr…
I wonder why Claude’s answers aren’t equal or better than Wikipedia - assuming Wikipedia is one of the training datasets. Is the temperature causing it to be probabilistic & other sources are carrying more weight?
You can think of a LLM as a type of lossy compression of knowledge.
With that in mind, is it really surprising that you don’t get the ‘right’ answer out? Any more than if you compress an image with JPEG, a given pixel isn’t the ‘right’ color anymore either?
They’re both close (kinda) at least, which is the point. If you wanted the exact right answer, don’t use lossy compression - it’ll be expensive in other ways though.
Re: Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia is the best first point of entry, but if you do use Claude, just tell it to do web search for you: https://claude.ai/share/73e67582-3e03-454b-aa12-e8906bd7b3fd
Why not just do a web search?
Claude gave a great answer at the link, at least for me. There might be a plus in learning as well since the answer is well structured with a recognizable style. Say, the scientific article above, has a distinct style and really was not high school physics level.
Re: Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
#29> All natural uranium today contains 0.720% of U-235. If you were to extract it from the Earth’s crust, or from rocks from the moon or in meteorites, that’s what you would find. But that bit of rock from Oklo contained only 0.717%.
Heh. The garbage web software developer me would have just called it good enough
Would be really interesting to know what the error bars on those figures look like
Re: Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
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