Uranium-bearing opals: Products of U-mobilization, diffusion, and transformation processes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding the retention mechanism of U by amorphous silica (i.e., opal) in the environment is of great importance to nuclear-waste disposal because opals can retain U for millions of years. Uraniferous opals from Spor Mountain and the Thomas Range, Utah, U.S.A., are examined in terms of their mineralogical, chemical, and isotopic compositions. Uranium-rich zones composed of most likely vorlanite, CaUO4, occur in fibrous opal-CT (termed lussatite) along the interface of the phase with microcrystalline quartz. Red- to black-colored precipitates of vorlanite also occur in the interstices between fibers and grains in lussatite and massy opals, respectively. The high abundance of vorlanite in certain growth zones can be explained by the diffusion of Ca and U along boundaries of layers, grains, and fibers and by the release of Ca and U through the transformation of opal-A into opal-CT and from opal-CT into microcrystalline quartz. Similar O-isotope compositions of opal-CT and associated microcrystalline quartz indicate that crystallization processes and deposition of subsequent layers of opal occurred from fluids of similar origin and T. Differences in the isotope and chemical composition between uraniferous opals/microcrystalline quartz, the SiO2 polymorph moganite, and pyrolusite indicate the past occurrence of various alteration processes involving fluids of different composition and T. The results of this study indicate that assemblages of opal and microcrystalline quartz can retain U for millions of years as long as confined pore spaces between different generations of opal and quartz or between growth features of opal provide space for the nucleation and adsorption of U-bearing phases and species.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".