Bow and thank you for the big 100 tip from "from, ex-彳疒"!

Returning to Port Augusta along Highway 1, Tang Feng's mood was completely different from when he came. When I came to Adelaide from Port Augusta, I was accompanied by Sophia, but when I returned, the people around me were already thousands of miles away.

This section of Highway No. 1 from Adelaide to Port Augusta is not very easy to walk, mainly because there are more vehicles on the road, and the speed has not been able to be lifted, Tang Feng set off from Adelaide at more than nine o'clock in the morning, and arrived at the unexpected Port Augusta more than 300 kilometers, which is already more than one o'clock at noon.

After a short break for lunch in the famous port city known as the "Crossroads of South Australia", Tang drove on the A87 and headed north along the wilderness between Lake Torrens and Lake Gairdner.

Lake Torrens is Australia's second largest lake, just north of Port Augusta, at the western foot of Flinders Ridge. It is a perennially dry fault lake, usually saline muddy, and when it rains heavily, the shallow lake bed is immediately filled with water, and then overflows the lake bed and flows south into Spencer Bay.

If Lake Torrens can really be filled with water, the area is still very large, this lake is a long and narrow lake, the length of the lake is 240 kilometers from north to south, and the width is only 64 kilometers at its widest point, from the map, Lake Torrens is more like a edamame.

The town of Olympic Dam that Tang Feng is going to this time is in the northwest corner of Lake Torrens. After following the A87 to Nulunga, say goodbye to the A87 and turn to the B97 to Mali, then walk about 70 kilometers to reach the Olympic Dam.

They are also wasteland towns, and the scale of the Olympic Dam Town is far larger than the roadside towns that Tang Feng has seen on the Aier Highway, if the towns that Tang Feng has seen on the Aier Highway are like the scale of a village group in the mountainous areas of China, then the scale of the Olympic Dam Town is really equivalent to a town.

The town has about seventy or eighty houses, mostly houses of local miners, and to the north of the town, there are hundreds of warehouses, many of which are arranged in the shape of plum blossoms, and these specially shaped warehouses are used to store radioactive elements such as uranium.

Less than two kilometers north of the town is a huge mining area of more than 20 square kilometers, which is known as the Olympic Dam mine.

The uranium mine at the Olympic Dam is dominated by bituminous uranium ore (uranium octaoxide), which is mined in an open-pit manner, so the uranium pit here has a dark green color when viewed from the air. Because the color of bituminous uranium ore itself is green.

The large bituminous uranium pits occupy the western and northern parts of the Olympic Dam mine and are made up of six huge pits, two large open-pit copper pits on the south side of the mine and two open-pit gold pits and one open-pit silver pit to the east of the uranium pit. The south-central part of the mine, surrounded by these pits, is the refinery.

Copper-uranium-gold-silver complex mining areas such as the Olympic Dam are common, but it is rare for a composite mining area with such large reserves to be found. The prospect-wide reserves of 5,979 million tonnes of various ores have an average grade of 0.93% copper, 290 g/t uranium octaoxide, 0.34 g/t gold and 1.68 g/t silver.

In 1972, several favorable areas, including the Stewart Shelf area, were finally selected for experimentation. Interpretation of gravity and magnetic anomalies and mapping of the linear structure of the area were then carried out to determine specific targets, including the Olympic Dam area.

Then, in 1974, in order to test the presence of favorable ore-bearing rocks in the Late Proterozoic caprock and basement source rocks, it was decided to conduct drilling experiments on two targets, including the Olympic Dam. As a result, the first hole was drilled at the Olympic Dam Zone RD1 and intersected 38m at 1.05% Cu at a depth of 353 metres!

To this day, there is still a monument to the discovery hole of the Olympic Dam in the RD1 area.

Geologically, the Olympic Dam is located in the Adelaide Trough. The Adelaide Trough is made up of 10km thick Late Proterozoic and Cambrian sedimentary rocks and a small amount of mafic volcanic rocks. The main components of the Proterozoic sedimentary rocks that make up the basement of the Olympic Dam area are unmetamorphosed sedimentary breccia and conglomerate.

This large and thick sedimentary breccia system formed by a large fault in the northwest-trending Adelaide Trough is characterized by a series of rich matrix breccia units containing bedded copper, uranium, rare earths and gold mineralisation. It is precisely because of this unique geological environment that the Olympic Dam is found to be so rich in copper, uranium, gold, silver and other minerals under its surface.

The Olympic Dam mining area is a giant mining area that any country in the world will look at it, and of course, Li Xiang is no exception. However, for the precious metals such as gold, silver and copper in the mining area, Tang Feng is not rare, and what he is rare is the huge amount of uranium under the ground.

In fact, uranium is quite abundant in the earth's crust, with an average content of 2.5 parts per million in the earth's crust, which means that a ton of crustal material contains an average of 2.5 grams of uranium. Because of its chemical properties are very active, uranium in its free state cannot be seen in nature, and uranium mostly exists in the form of compounds in the earth's crust, such as bituminous uranium ore (uranium octaoxide), crystalline uranium ore (the main component is uranium dioxide), uranium, uranium black, and the most beautiful arsenic copper uranium.

The radioactivity of uranium itself is not very strong, but when uranium ore is mined, it often contains a large number of radioactive radioactive elements such as radium and radon, which causes the current situation of uranium ore with strong radioactivity.

But no matter what it is, as long as it is a natural radioactive element, it is something that the star core likes to eat. The average level of uranium octaoxide in the Olympic Dam mining area is as high as 290 g/t, plus other associated radioactive elements, whether it is radium, radon or other substances, this time it will definitely be enough for the star core to eat again!

Pretending to be a traveler on a road trip, Tang Feng found a motel on the side of the road to stay in after arriving in the small town of Olympic Dam. Although the town is separated from the storage area and the mining area, the mining area is still within the absorption range of the star core, which means that Tang Feng can lie on the bed in the motel room at night, and then let the star core absorb the radioactive elements underground!