Comment by kadoban
2 months ago
> Might that be plausible?
Not really. You're talking about a fungus creating essentially a nuclear reactor inside of its cells, and creating it out of fuel that's not good enough to make a nuclear reactor in the first place (it at one time was, but now it's a mess of decay products and nonsense).
Reactors also take a certain amount of mass. You can't just squish two tiny microgram particles together and hope to get anything going.
> Reactors also take a certain amount of mass. You can't just squish two tiny microgram particles together and hope to get anything going.
Do they? Why not?
> Do they?
Pretty sure
> Why not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass
Technically I guess I can't prove it wouldn't work if you make it dense/hot/covered-in-reflectors enough, but I'm pretty sure it's _well_ beyond the limits of what a fungus could even conceivably do.
Note that the only numbers on that page have various critical masses in kg. That's a bigass fungus.
And that's still not getting into: the "fuel" here is real shit. It's gotta be beyond its useful life even if you ignore that the thing melted down and corroded and blew up.