Comment by andrewflnr
3 months ago
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.
3 months ago
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
Well you misunderstood but also you aren't correct.
Hot is commonly used to mean radioactive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_particle
One mode of radioactive decay is electron capture, which is absolutely impacted by temperature (just mentioning this as trivia, I meant hot-as-in-radioactive).
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