I guess I need to say a few words about "duds". A dud is when
#1 There is no uranium in an area. This is most areas. I'm not talking about the amount spread out throughout the soil, that's everywhere, I'm talking about there are no concentrated ores.
#2 The ore deposit in question is not porous. If this is the case, thorium cannot escape and there are no nuclear explosives in the area.
#3 The uranium in the ore is soluble in water. These deposits are (geologically) recently exposed and won't last long.
#4 The chemistry of the deposit locks up thorium immediately after it decays from the uranium. Thus the thorium does not escape.
#5 The chemistry of an area around the deposit does not lock up either thorium or uranium and it flows all the way out to the ocean. This happens more easily if the deposit is near a seashore.
#6 I hope somebody else can figure out some way an area can be a dud and publishes it.
I will cheerfully fire a dud rather than miss an interception. My second interception was a dud. I was wondering if this stuff might occur in my own backyard. The clue I followed was Stacy Pool in Austin. This is a warm pool where homeless bums (yes I spent some time as one of those, I'm a Vietnam veteran) came to take a shower and get the slime of the streets off of them. I wondered why it was hot and thought maybe it might be radiogenically heated.
Because of an old well on the grounds, I thought the water came from a shallow source and it was hard to think of any other way it could be heated; the Balcones Fault near Austin hasn't moved in 65 million years. So I gathered some samples and took them to the University of Texas, where it checked out as background radiation. Later I talked to Dr. Bob Blodgett, head of the Geology department at Austin Community College, whom I had previously talked to about the Petrified Forrest National Park. He had apparently talked to some of the UT people and knew I had submitted samples.
He told me that Stacy Pool was actually fed by a tube well 1200 feet deep. He also said the water was slightly saline and so he suspected the water came from even deeper. This pretty much exactly explained why Stacy Pool was hot. I no longer believe that radiogenic heating is a significant source of heating for Stacy Pool.
Austin has a very large deposit of Austin Chalk underneath it and this rock contains a substantial amount of petroleum. The chalk is not very porous so it's hard to make money from a chalk well. They run dry after about 6 months then you have to wait a long time for it to fill up again. Petroleum fixes uranium, but this would be of normal isotopic composition. I decided not to bring this up with Dr. Blodgett. It would waste time.
I ran into #4 in Pennsylvania prior to moving here. I got a report from a far-left blog that there was radium in the streams of Western Pennsylvania. They blamed fracking, I was not so sure. So I started searching "radium in Pennsylvania" and got a flood of official government reports that indicated that many, many of the streams there had radium in them. Now I knew it wasn't fracking.
The radium reported included both radium 226 and radium 228. Radium 226 is in the decay chain of uranium and decays from thorium 230. But radium 228 alpha-decays directly from thorium 232, the common variety of thorium. What that means is the source rock has insoluble compounds of both uranium and thorium; the radium does dissolve. That's kind of a mystery and I hope rgg can address this.
Most Project Zeus duds are about amount. Large deposits are more likely, obviously. Sheriff Johnson's call from Baraga County comes from a large deposit that didn't have enough time, I thought. Now I know there was enough time.
Have a nice day.
