It doesn't really eat the nuclear waste, it "just" feeds on the radioactive energi, so it doesn't speed up the decay. But you can use them as a radiation shield.
As far as I know you cannot speed up the decay, unless you put it in a particle accelerator and bombard it into something with a much faster half life?
That just gives you radioactive bacteria who might crawl around a bit and spread the radioactivity. You can't get rid of a nuclear problem by chemistry.
You are correct, of course, but in a sci-fi scenario maybe you could have a colony of fungi that move nuclear material around internally to keep it 'hot', thus 'burn it off' faster to extract energy. It might collect material from a wide area.
Things happily eat nuclear waste. This is one of the big problems with nuclear waste, your body will happily integrate radioactive isotopes or heavy metals, which then slowly kill you.
We already have radiotrophic fungus, found near Chernobyl. Interestingly they appear to use melanin to absorb and utilise energy from the radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
It doesn't really eat the nuclear waste, it "just" feeds on the radioactive energi, so it doesn't speed up the decay. But you can use them as a radiation shield.
As far as I know you cannot speed up the decay, unless you put it in a particle accelerator and bombard it into something with a much faster half life?
Not exactly a scalable solution.
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That just gives you radioactive bacteria who might crawl around a bit and spread the radioactivity. You can't get rid of a nuclear problem by chemistry.
You are correct, of course, but in a sci-fi scenario maybe you could have a colony of fungi that move nuclear material around internally to keep it 'hot', thus 'burn it off' faster to extract energy. It might collect material from a wide area.
Heat doesn't impact radioactive decay, though the sci-fi fungi could have some internal neutron reflectors that may make something interesting happen
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Things happily eat nuclear waste. This is one of the big problems with nuclear waste, your body will happily integrate radioactive isotopes or heavy metals, which then slowly kill you.