Passing through Yellowstone on one of our journeys, Love and I found ourselves in foggy mists beside a boiling spring, and on impulse he got out a scintillometer and held it over the water. The scintillometer clicked away at a hundred and fifty counts per second, indicating that the radioactivity in the spring was about three times background. Interesting-but not exactly adrenalizing to a man who had seen the thing going at five thousand and upward. In the years that immediately followed the Second World War, the worldwide search for uranium was so feverish that geologists themselves seemed to be about three times background. Not only was the arms race getting under way-with the security of the United States thought to be enhanced by zakelijke energie vergelijken the fashioning of ever larger and ever smaller uranium bombs-but also there was promise of a panacean new deal in which this heaviest of all elements found in nature would cheaply heat homes and light cities. The rock that destroyed Hiroshima had come out of the Colorado Plateau, and it was to that region that prospectors were principally drawn. As any geologist would tell you, metal deposits were the result of hydrothermal activity. Geochemists imagined that water circulating deep in the crust picked up whatever it encountered-gold, silver, uranium, tin, all of which would go into solution with enough heat and pressure. They imagined the metal rising with the water and precipitating near tl1e surface. By definition, a vein of ore was the filling of a fissure near a hot spring. This theory was so correct that it tended to seal off the zakelijke energie conversation from intrusion by other ideas. Three geologists working in South Dakota in i950 and i951 found uranium in a deposit of coal. Locally, there was no hydrothermal history. Oligocene tuff-volcanic detritus blown east a great distance-overlay the coal. There were people who thought that ordinaiy groundwater had leached the uranium out of the tuff and carried it into the coal.