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The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

bbc.com

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Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

#51

Post by mikea1 »

kakacik wrote: post #24
_young_grug_ wrote: post #22

This would be a cool origin story for astrophage (from Project Hail Mary, a fun & light sci fi read by the Martian guy)

There is a movie coming with Ryan Gosling, I sure hope they keep the spirit of the book and don't turn that into some bizarre hollywoodish cash grab

I think the Martian was adapted well from book to movie, so I have hope for this one. That said, compressing the entire story into a theatre runtime is tricky: I think it would be a win if only half of the character and relationship growth of the two ship bound protagonists comes through in the adaptation (because it was sooo good in the book!)

Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

#52

Post by lionkor »

reliablereason wrote: post #18
kalaksi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you're going with this, but since they have actually researched how it grows, I think it's more likely your calculations/assumptions are incomplete. For example: > Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial biomaterial based on what? Edit: Maybe you meant that radiation alone wouldn't be enough for that growth, so there'd be other components that it's helping with.

Initially i asked a AI for standard values but here is a proper source: - Negentropy concept revisited: Standard thermodynamic properties of 16 bacteria, fungi and algae species ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.00494 ) > Maybe you meant that radiation alone wouldn't be enough for that growth, so there'd be other components that it's helping with. Yes. Clearly it grew as it grew, but the question is what drove/powered the…

General rule of thumb: If you're going to ask an LLM and then make a post based on that, simply don't post it. If we wanted a randomly generated take on this, we would just ask an LLM ourselves.

Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

#53

Post by noefingway »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #27
once_inc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add in some evolutionary strategies, and you have the recipe for a good sci-fi book: a fungus in Chernobyl rapidly outpaces its competitors due to its ability to absorb radiation. Each iteration grows and reproduces faster, until it is so blindingingly fast that it begins to outpace the output the fuel rods produce. The world rejoices as this fungus is perfect for cleaning up nuclear waste products, until we realize…

A variation on the Gray Goo scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo

The Blob: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/?ref_=fn_t_2

Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

#54

Post by PatronBernard »

reliablereason wrote: post #3

I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra. - If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture - That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material. - Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial b…

Sources dude...

Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

#55

Post by infinet »

The article talks about fungi been attracted to ionising radiation. Per wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation

Ionizing (or ionising) radiation is particle or photon that has enough energy to detaching electron from atoms or molecules. It includes all the usual high energy radiations such as Gamma, X-rays, high energy UV, alpha, beta, neutron et al. HN high energy physicists can correct me, sounds like it is not any particular category of the harmful radiation from a nuclear disaster, it is all of them.

Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

#56

Post by Retric »

credit_guy wrote: post #29
reliablereason wrote: post #3

I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra. - If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture - That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material. - Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial b…

I also did some back of the envelope calculations. Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law). Now, the radiation from the elephant foot has decreased significantly. I couldn't find a rece…

> Here's what I got: the radiation level just 1 meter away from the "elephant foot" (the solidified molten core), at the time of the accident was about 1000 times lower than the solar irradiation. At 100 meters it was 10 million times lower (because of the inverse square law).

No, the elephants foot isn’t a point source at its surface.

To use an extreme example going from 1m away from the sun to 100m away from the sun doesn’t result in a 10,000x drop off in energy density. Instead the exponential drop-off occurs relative to the center of the sun because energy is coming from any point on the surface visible to that location. A similar principle applies with the elephants foot, though the geometry is more complicated.

Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

#57

Post by Cthulhu_ »

lazide wrote: post #15
mikkupikku wrote: post #12

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I read about this fungus. Let us grant the premise of a fungus somehow harnessing ionizing radiation using melanin; such a fungus could in principle be used to shield radioactive sources, but it won't "eat it up"; the radioactive isotopes emitting that radiation won't be disposed of in any way by the fungus. They don't eat those, and even if they did it wouldn't get rid o…

Something the fungus COULD do (in a hypothetical world) is concentrate radioisotopes along with some moderator to accelerate the fission process and harvest more energy. Would probably require a lot more time than it would have, however, considering the relatively low amounts of radioisotopes in todays world (due to the halflife of most of them, and the age of our planet). Several billion years ago it could have been…

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.

Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

#58

Post by Cthulhu_ »

wincy wrote: post #50
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to do it, don't click this if you value the next 72 hours or so of your life: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Whew thank goodness I was already exposed to that once and am, like other plagues, thus inoculated.

Same, finished it once - I'm glad it actually has an ending.

But I am going to add it to the Gray Goo wiki page under "in popular culture".

Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

#59

Post by Retric »

reliablereason wrote: post #3

I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra. - If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture - That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material. - Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial b…

> That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material

Over what timeframe? If that’s 0.05 J per hour and “the researchers found that fungi that faced the galactic cosmic radiation for 26 days grew an average 1.21 times faster” 26 * 25 / 21% and the numbers don’t look that unreasonable.

Re: The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

#60

Post by khuey »

once_inc wrote: post #10
reliablereason wrote: post #3

I did some basic calculations to compare the energy in the radiation vs the energy required to grow 10% extra. - If we assume they are working in the reactor we get radiation levels of something like 1 mGy/hour. But we can prop this up to mabye 500 mGy/hour since i dont know how they grew their culture - That leads to 0.05 J of extra energy per gram of microbial bio material. - Energy needed to grow 1g of microbial b…

Add in some evolutionary strategies, and you have the recipe for a good sci-fi book: a fungus in Chernobyl rapidly outpaces its competitors due to its ability to absorb radiation. Each iteration grows and reproduces faster, until it is so blindingingly fast that it begins to outpace the output the fuel rods produce. The world rejoices as this fungus is perfect for cleaning up nuclear waste products, until we realize…

Some similar concepts are found in The Expanse for those who have not read/seen it.
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