Quest for a nuclear georeactor

Knowledge about the interior of our planet is mainly based on the interpretation of seismic data from earthquakes and nuclear explosions and of composition of meteorites. Additional observations have led to a wide range of hypotheses on the heat flow from the interior to the crust, the abundance of certain noble gases in gasses vented from volcanoes and the possibility of a nuclear georeactor at the centre of the Earth. This paper focuses on a proposal for an underground detector set-up to develop further antineutrinos as a tool to map the distribution of radiogenic heat sources, such as the natural radionuclides and the hypothetical nuclear georeactor. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.