RADIATION-INDUCED DEFECTS IN DRUSY QUARTZ, ATHABASCA BASIN, CANADA: A NEW AID TO EXPLORATION OF URANIUM DEPOSITS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Room-temperature powder electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectra of drusy quartz (i.e., euhedral quartz crystals as coatings on or infillings in cavities and fractures) from five uranium mineralized areas in the eastern Athabasca basin, Saskatchewan, Canada, reveal a suite of radiation-induced defects. These EPR spectra also show that radiation-induced defects in drusy quartz from different geologic occurrences are similar in nature but vary widely in abundance. For example, radiation-induced defects in drusy quartz from altered basement rocks significantly below mineralization are close to or below detection limits, providing the first line of direct evidence for previous suggestions that fluids from the underlying basement rocks were uranium deficient. Drusy quartz in ore samples and those from alteration haloes around uranium orebodies are characterized by elevated levels of radiation-induced defects. Similarly, drusy quartz from less-altered sandstones near the present-day surface (hundreds of meters above mineralization), where uranium-rich minerals are generally absent, contains abundant radiation-induced defects. Comparison of EPR spectra of drusy quartz from less-altered sandstones before and after HF treatments reveals that radiation-induced defects are uniformly distributed in individual crystals, in contrast to the preferred concentration in the grain margins and along fractures in detrital quartz. These results suggest that radiation-induced defects in drusy quartz were most likely formed by bombardment of alpha particles emitted by uranium-bearing fluids during crystal growth. Therefore, detection of radiation-induced defects in drusy quartz from less-altered sandstones represents a new near-surface technique for exploration of uranium mineralization in the Athabasca basin.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".