Sourcing extraterrestrial Nuclear fuel

Hi Val,

I'm not sure where to turn for links either. I
learned about this while studying the Pikes Peak
Batholith in Colorado. There is a city named
Blackhawk laced with Pitchblend veins and nearby city
of Boulder sits on one of the biggest concentrations
of Uranium known by the seep of Uranium laced
groundwater reacting with the Carbon rich Pierre
Shale.

The Laramide uplift remelted and injected the Pikes
Peak Batholith super enriching it in rare earth
metals. It is one of three such batholiths around the
world where it is profitable to mine the source
granite. The deposits in Utah are from the property
of uranium oxides to form a crust on sand grains and
thus be concentrated by wind and water evaporation.

There are probably a couple of articles on the high
concentration of radioactivity of coal ash. There is
1.5 times as much recoverable energy in the
radioactive elements than in the burning of the coal.
Essentially you can burn coal just to get the ash
which is high in Radium and other fun elements.

In specific reference to Mars, the wind is there and
there may have been enough water at some point to do
some concentrating. Sort of this I see no point in
depending on radioisotopes for power there. The NASA
Mars probes should be able to verify this easily.

If anyone knows of an exterterrestrial process for
concentration that I don't know of, please speak up.

Cheers, Thor

Nuclear fuel
>Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 08:52:38 -0800 (PST)
>
>To my knowlege, all of the Uranium deposits on earth
>are the result of water in one way or another.
>Uranium and a host of other metals are concentrated
by
>magma bodies as they don't fit into common crystal
>structures. The magmatic fluids (CO2 & H2O) carry
>away these elements to form veins of pitchblend or
>precipitate in carbon deposits by replacement.
>Colorado is an excellent place to see both.
>
>The moon did have volcanic activity yet it is unclear
>to me if this caused the differentiation and
>fractionation necessary to form concentrated
deposits.
> Flood basalts are not intrusive plutons so there
>would be no overburden to have hot springs. Simple
>spattered lava will not get you much.
>
>You will pick up traces of Thorium and Uranium from
>satellite scans. The actual mining and recovery may
>be down to parts per million which makes electrolysis
>of water look really cheap and easy :) The asteroids
>do not look any better for differentiation. Mars
>didn't have subduction to get pluton arcs and
>progressive concentration.
>
>Sorry Earth may be it.
>
>Cheers, Thor
>(ex Geologist)
>
>"Nuclear fuel needs to be sourced out there to be
>feasible, and I'd bet a lot of research has already
>been done and it's done right now in this respect...
>how difficult it is to spot uranium deposits a few MK
>away? ;)"

Darned if I could find it with Google searches, Thor.
If you have any links
or leads, please pass them on.

By-the-way, I am an avid collector of meteorites, and
have a particular
fondnesss for the metallic variety. I have often
wondered whether or not the
parent bodies of these little nuggets would contain
uranium and the like in
concentrations large enough to be extracted
practically. If so, shouldn't
the craters on the moon also have similar depoisits?

Val