Comment by anonymousDan
1 hour ago
I don't understand why the nuclear industry wouldn't pile in to fund research into this area (as a potential way to clean up nuclear waste). Probably I don't understand how this fungus actually works and it is impossible!
As mentioned elsethread, it doesn't actually clean up anything, since it doesn't affect the waste at all, just turns some of the radiation into metabolism in the same way that plants turn solar radiation into metabolism.
Even if it did somehow accelerate the decay, it wouldn't be that useful, since (Chernobyl aside), all the waste from the typical civilian nuclear reactor can fit in a side lot on the site of the reactor complex itself (and often does!). There just isn't that much radioactive waste to clean up!
Yeah waste has been a red herring that anti nuclear people like to bring up. Yes it’s nasty stuff but there isn’t that much of it and it can be buried or reprocessed it’s not a real problem.
Low level waste is an expensive pain in the buttocks. I toured a local medical and research reactor back in highschool, and they were running out of space to store their discarded PPE and other minimally contaminated waste. You could probably empty most of the barrels on the floor and roll in the contents without any noticeable effect, and yet they still needed to be treated like real waste, just in case.
Not to disagree with you, just to say that even though it's a minor nuisance it nevertheless occupies a lot of mental space because of how annoying it is.
I don’t see a straightforward way this would actually help with the cleanup. A hypothetical microbe that “eats” oil would be useful in an oil spill as would chemically break down the oil and harvest its carbon.
A radiotropic fungus that’s in TFA can’t meaningfully affect the rate at which nuclear decay is happening. What it can do, supposedly, is to harvest the energy that the nuclear decay is releasing; normally there’s too much energy for an organism to safely handle.
At the risk of vastly oversimplifying, you can’t plug your phone into high voltage transmission lines. These fungi are using melanin to moderate the extra energy, stepping it down into a range that’s useful (or at least minimally harmful).
clean it up how? by having fungus grow near it?
almost nobody cares about solving actual problems :C
for sure noone understand fully how a living organism "works" but it could be possible... at least to learn something.