REPORTS emerging from the Tanzanian capital, Dar Es Salaam, says the country is to begin mining and processing uranium within three years, following the announcement of two commercial discoveries in the Central and Southern regions of the country.
Exploration estimates indicate that the country has about 5.9 million pounds of uranium oxide {U306} deposits, that at the current prices of USD 41 per pound, is worth USD 2.2 billion.
Two firms, Matra Resources and Uranex Resources, have been exploring for the mineral in Tanzania, and have confirmed discovery, which are now only waiting for the new Mining Bill to be tabled in Parliament before the end of this month to commence mining.
A week ago, the report says, the Proactive Investors Website said Uranex, an Australian listed company with projects in Australia and Tanzania, had announced the discovery of new uranium mineral mineralization, during pitting of its previously untested Mbuga G site in the northern part of the Manyoni Project in Central Tanzania.
In addition, further uranium mineralization has also been identified at Mbuga A C West, D, and F, including recent assays returned from 2009.
Managing Director, John Cottle was quoted last week by the influential EASTAFRICAN as saying, “We are very excited about these new uranium intersection as they continue to confirm our belief in the mineral potential of the Manyoni district.
The Mining Bill is geared to create a win-win situation for both investor and Tanzania, unlike its predecessor, the mining Act 1998, which gave disproportionate note revenue benefits to many companies operating in the land. Both Matra and Uranex said the actual production will begin after three years.
The coming on stream of uranium will make the most dependable export for Tanzania after gold.
The mining sector in general earned the country USD 111.5 million in 2009, contributing 3 per cent to the gross domestic products {GDP}.
Tanzania ultimately aims to exploit its uranium deposits to produce nuclear power to export to the East, Southern and Central African markets.
And last week, at a meeting of the Forum of Nuclear Regulatory Bodies in Africa {FNRBA} held in Abuja, Nigeria, the United States pledged its willingness to help African countries interested in generating electricity from nuclear sources. Tanzania is a member of FNRBA, along with Congo, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Namibia and Tunisia.
Matra, which will mine uranium in the South of the country at Namtumbo district, Ruvuma region expects to produce 3.7 million pounds per year worth USD 151.7 million, using a 1,500 strong workforce and investment of about USD 400 million, according to its website.
Ends
Leooderaomolo@yahoo.com
On the Fate of the Universe.
By Jared Baraza, Associate Physicist, Pan African Institute of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, Kenya.
Abstract:
How did the Universe come into being and what is its destiny?. Will the Universe have an end or it will be there forever?. How big is the Universe today and what will be its shape and size in the future? Some of these questions have fascinated scientists over the last centuries without a definitive answer. This paper will shade light on some of these mind boggling questions. Our Sun is one of 100,000,000 stars in our Galaxy The Milky Way. The observable universe contains 100,000,000 Galaxies. The Sun is just one in 1000,000,000,000,000 stars in the Milky way Galaxy.
Ancient Greek Cosmology:
In the beginning there was an empty darkness. The only thing in this void was Nyx (Chaos), a bird with black wings. With the wind she laid a golden egg and for ages she sat upon this egg. Finally life began to stir in the egg and out of it rose Eros, the god of love. One half of the shell rose into the air and became the sky and the other became the Earth. Eros named the sky Uranus and the Earth he named Gaia. Then Eros made them fall in love.
Hebrew Cosmology:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Copernican cosmology: Nicholais Copernicus (1500-1600).
The Earth is not at the centre of the solar system. The solar system is not at the centre of the galaxy. The galaxy is not at the centre of the Universe. Earth life are neither at the beginning or end of time. Earth life exist on neither the largest (cosmological) or smallest (subatomic) scales. There is nothing special about Earth that especially favoured the development of Life. The Copernican revolution happened because of Johannes Kepler(1571-1630) and Galileo Galilea (1564-1642). They postulated that the earth was not at the center of the universe as postulated by Ptolemy and Aristarchus. Galileo was sentenced to death by the pope for this theory. Hubble’s discovery came alongside the work of V.M. Slipher (red shift), Heber Curtis (galaxies as “island universes”) and Harlow Shapley (distance measurements) to name but three. As late as the turn of the 20th century, astronomers believed that the Sun was effectively at the center of the galaxy, which was synonymous with the center of the universe. The work of Harlow Shapley and Henrietta Leavitt in 1918 displaced the Sun to the outer regions of the galaxy, and observations by Hubble and others proved that the Milky Way was just one galaxy of many (1923). Albert Einstein also predicted an expanding universe based on his cosmological constant.
Modern Cosmology:
Approximately 15 billion years ago, all of the matter in the universe was concentrated at a single point. A cataclysmic explosion called the Big Bang caused the matter to fly apart. In the intervening years, the universe has been expanding, cooling as it goes.
Big bang cosmology:
The current theory is that the universe came into being as a result of the big Bang that took place about 13.7 billion years ago. At the big bang the five forces in nature came into being: strong, gravitation, electromagnetic, and weak forces as well as time. Matter comprising electrons, quarks and gluons was formed during the big bang. Today we talk of space-time as having three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. The Big Bang itself was not an explosion like that of a bomb; rather it was a rapid expansion of the Universe from a singularity followed by an inflation phase. A singularity can be defined as an infinitely dense and infinitely hot and very tiny volume. The density of the singularity was infinite and temperature over one billion degrees Kelvin. Today the average temperature of the universe is 2.725 Kelvin. In the early 1920s observations by Edwin Hubble, again began to suggest that the distribution of galaxies, at least in the local Universe, is isotropic and homogeneous on large scales.
Einsteins Universe:
Einstein and de Sitter (late 1910s and 1920s, Germany), Friedmann (1922, USSR), Lemaitre (1927, Belgium), and Robertson and Walker (1935, US/UK) produced the first solutions of the field equations for an isotropic and homogeneous Universe. The types of solutions they found: Model 1: Collapse, ending in a singularity. Model 2: Expansion from a singularity, gradually slowing and reversing under the influence of gravity, ending in a collapse to a singularity.
This and the previous outcome are for universes with total kinetic energy than the gravitational binding energy. They are called closed universes. Expansion from a singularity, that gradually slows, then stops. Total kinetic energy = gravitational binding energy. This is generally called a marginal, or critical, Universe. Expansion from a singularity, that continues forever in which total kinetic energy is greater than gravitational binding energy. This is called an open universe. Model 1 is of course a lot like what we now call black hole formation, since it ends in a singularity. Note that models 2-4 all involve expansion from a singularity, so the creation and development of the Universe must be rather like black hole formation running in reverse.
Hubble’s expanding and accelerating universe.
From Hubble’s theory of the big bang we deduce that the Universe is expanding and cooling down at a rate determined by the Hubble constant H. The universal expansion is proportional to the Hubble constant and the distance of galaxies from any position in the Universe. It is further postulated that the Universe does not have a center as was commonly believed by scientists in the Galilean and Newtonian eras. From Hubble observations, we can say that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating. This is in conformity with Albert Einstein’s missing cosmological constant. The reason for this acceleration still puzzles scientists. However it is believed that there is an external force causing this acceleration known as dark energy. The Universe comprises of 4% visible baryonic matter, 23% dark matter and rest 73% dark energy. A property of space itself, in the sense that it fills otherwise empty space with a uniform density creates a repulsive force, pushing everything apart originally hypothesized by Albert Einstein to balance the gravitational pull of the stars on each other. Quantum physics seems to predict huge amounts of dark energy. Until recently, most physicists thought that somehow these quantum effects cancel out to leave no dark energy at all. Given that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, the density of dark energy must be very small but nonzero. As the universe expands, the density of matter in the universe decreases. Positive energy density causes repulsion of matter. It is believed that the density of matter in the universe today has reached a critical density level (k=0) and will just manage to expand forever. This means the curvature of the universe is flat. If the density falls below the critical density then the universal will expand forever (k=-1). If the density is greater than the critical density (k=+1) the universe will re-collapse. This is the closed universe. If there is more than a certain amount of matter in the universe (r>rcritical), the attractive nature of gravity will ensure that the Universe re-collapses! Hubble’s universe expansion constant H0=72 km/s/Mpc.
Proof of expansion of universe:
In 1929, Hubble made his third great contribution to cosmology; he observed that distant galaxies are always seen to have red shifted spectra. Thus they all recede from us. The magnitude of this Doppler shift for any given distant galaxy is in direct proportion to the distance to this galaxy: with V = velocity and D = distance to galaxy, where H0 = 20 km/sec/Mly according to the most recent measurements by the Hubble Space Telescope.
De Sitter’s Oscillating universe:
The De Sitter theory on the other hand predicts that the closed universe will collapse when the density falls below the critical density, but rebound into an oscillating universe. In other words the universe has been there and will always be there into infinity. This theory also suggests that time has always been there in the past and will be in future contrary to big bang cosmology where time separated from the other four forces at the big bang.
When the sun will run out of nuclear fuel:
When the Sun runs out of its nuclear fuel in about five billion years time, it will go through a beautiful death ritual, shedding its outer layers in a blaze of color while its inside squeezes down into a dense white hot ball about the size of the Earth. This ball, aptly named a white dwarf, is where the story ends for the Sun, but not so other white dwarfs. About 2/3 of all stars in a galaxy live in pairs called binaries, a union that becomes dangerous when one of the pair turns into a white dwarf. One star may run through its life cycle faster, becoming a white dwarf while the other star continues to shine normally. This is true of the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, which has a faint white dwarf companion. The white dwarf is greedy, and if the orbit of the white dwarf and its companion is close, the white dwarf’s strong gravity begins to tug the outer layers of hydrogen gas from the companion and wrap the gas around itself, in the process creating a ticking time bomb. The hydrogen layer grows, getting hotter and hotter, until at a critical temperature the bomb goes off – a thermonuclear explosion as bright as a billion stars, and a flash that can be seen across the observable universe. Because the process is identical for each white dwarf supernova, the event has a predictable, and reproducible, brightness.
Jerry Ochieng.
Migori County,
Kenya.