The rare stone thing would be better for nuclear power. Find lots of rare stone, put it together in a huge pile, they get warm and cause mysterious diseases.
Uranium is actually pretty common, refining out the right isotope is the complicated part. Heck there were a couple natural nuclear reactors in a place that generated power for a few million years.
Isn’t uranium that’s pure enough naturally to cause a reaction on its own really rare? I’m referring to the Chicago Pile experiment. It was so simple that it could have been theoretically built thousands of years ago which is crazy to think about.
Not really. Every single shovel full of dirt has trace amounts. It’s just gathering enough into a pile. Like I said, nature did it on earth, before humans existed. It’s weapons grade uranium that’s really rare
Gold is rare, compared to just about every other element, in accessible areas of earth. All the gold ever discovered on Earth would fit inside a 23 meter (75 foot) cube. This is about 244 thousand tons, in all of human history.
Compare this to iron, where just the United States produces 46 Million tons in 2022 alone.
There is plenty of gold deep within the Earth - it is very dense, so it sank towards the core when Earth was recently formed - but on the surface and the proximal crust, it is not found in abundance.
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