IS OSLO ON THE WAY FROM OKLO TO OKALO?

Long ago, fissionable uranium was more abundant than today, because it had not yet had time to decay.  No enrichment process was necessary for water to turn rich deposits of uranium into natural nuclear reactors that went critical, boiling their surroundings and releasing all of the products of neutron capture and  fission most feared by the antinuclear activists of today, from   plutonium and radioiodine to cesium 137 and cobalt 60.

The first of these billion year old natural Chernobyls was discovered  by a French mining company at Oklo in Gabon  half a century ago, and  now , by sheer coincidence , the Finns have chosen a nearly eponymous site, Okalo, for the first nuclear waste repository designed to outlast the time scale of human evolution, which to the extent that it started in Africa, may have received a mutational nudge from the natural history of the reactors that lit up the neighborhood when the world was young.

That the two sites feature gneissic rocks of the same era may have contributed to the Finnish choice- a geological sojourn to Gabon might afford a preview of distant things to come.

Here is the BBC's report on the project