Comment by Cthulhu_
2 hours ago
But if it concentrates isotopes to accellerate fission, wouldn't that cause the material to heat up and, ultimately, kill the fungus? Depends on rate of concentration of course, if it just grabs the odd airborne isotope (if that's a thing) then maybe.
All living organisms have this problem - people who can’t sweat/are in environments with no effective evaporation die, piles of leaves with fungus can heat up so much they catch on fire and burn, etc.
Most life has evolved some sort of mechanism to control it, but sometimes it doesn’t work right.
If such a fungus existed and we had enough radioactive material lying around for it to survive, I’d expect the occasional random meltdown to occur.
Notably, this happened due to pure natural causes anyway a couple billion years ago! [https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-tw...]