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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

#101

Post by strken »

SoftTalker wrote: post #95
randallsquared wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reac…

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.

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

#102

Post by toast0 »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #41
Andrex wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This lines up with a book idea I've had for like 20 years. Crazy! Don't wait to write sci-fi I suppose! Life may catch up, haha.

Idea is nothing, execution is everything. Just write it if you want to.

Also, doesn't matter if it's been done before either. Lots of very popular books are quite similar to books published before them. Sci-Fi is not immune.

There's all sorts of memes about SciFi films that borrowed ideas and motifs from earlier works... but often when you did, it comes out that the earlier works also borrowed those pieces.

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

#103

Post by reliablereason »

i_cannot_hack wrote: post #76
reliablereason wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"? I hear you. It was really just food for thought.

> If i understand that correctly the "energy required to grow" would be bigger than the "enthalpy of formation"? They are almost completely unrelated concepts. The enthalpy of formation from the paper is the free useable energy that would be generated if you assembled all the molecules in the biomatter from the constituent atoms. E.g. the energy that would be released if you took pure hydrogen and pure oxygen and com…

Um right did not think of that, if you burn a organism you get to core components but the organism was not originally made of the core components.

The core idea was not generated from a chat bot. Neither was the article i gave (that was my own googling).

The core idea (that there is a requirement and a availability of energy that may differ) was generated from my brain not that i personally think the origin of an idea matters to its value.

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

#104

Post by credit_guy »

Retric wrote: post #56
credit_guy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

I treated the elephant foot as a point source. It’s a back of the envelope calculation. Maybe I’m off by a factor of 10, but I’m not off by a factor of one million.

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

#105

Post by Retric »

credit_guy wrote: post #104
Retric wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 su…

I treated the elephant foot as a point source. It’s a back of the envelope calculation. Maybe I’m off by a factor of 10, but I’m not off by a factor of one million.

I mean if your benchmark was “at the time of the accident” then you’re off by more than a factor of a million. The often quoted 80 to 100 grays per hour was eight months after formation and it had gotten way less radioactive by then. Decay heat which all comes from radioactivity was ~1% of full reactor output for a few days. ~10,000 kW or so from a fairly compact object which is why it was still melting through concrete.

As to a point source, if you’re making an approximation use the center of the object and your 100m distance calculation would be corrected by about 25x. Though obviously the building itself provides shielding.

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

#106

Post by credit_guy »

Retric wrote: post #105
credit_guy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I treated the elephant foot as a point source. It’s a back of the envelope calculation. Maybe I’m off by a factor of 10, but I’m not off by a factor of one million.

I mean if your benchmark was “at the time of the accident” then you’re off by more than a factor of a million. The often quoted 80 to 100 grays per hour was eight months after formation and it had gotten way less radioactive by then. Decay heat which all comes from radioactivity was ~1% of full reactor output for a few days. ~10,000 kW or so from a fairly compact object which is why it was still melting through concr…

I used the figure you quoted, which I got from wikipedia [1]. I said "at the time of the accident"; you are pointing out it was 8 months after the accident. I guess I should specify all the details in my comments on HN going forward? I said that now the radiation level must be lower, and I could't find any more recent estimates, but I ballparked it at 100x lower.

In the end, I'm not sure what your point is? Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun, and therefore fungi can't "feed" on it, because this energy is nowhere near enough to sustain life?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant%27s_Foot_(Chernobyl)#...

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

#107

Post by Retric »

credit_guy wrote: post #106
Retric wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if your benchmark was “at the time of the accident” then you’re off by more than a factor of a million. The often quoted 80 to 100 grays per hour was eight months after formation and it had gotten way less radioactive by then. Decay heat which all comes from radioactivity was ~1% of full reactor output for a few days. ~10,000 kW or so from a fairly compact object which is why it was still melting through concr…

I used the figure you quoted, which I got from wikipedia [1]. I said "at the time of the accident"; you are pointing out it was 8 months after the accident. I guess I should specify all the details in my comments on HN going forward? I said that now the radiation level must be lower, and I could't find any more recent estimates, but I ballparked it at 100x lower. In the end, I'm not sure what your point is? Are you d…

> Are you disagreeing with my overall estimate that the energy produced by the elephant's foot's radioactivity at 100 meters distance is one billion times lower than the energy we receive from the sun

Yes, the elephants foot is not the only radiation source at Chernobyl making your calculation meaningless in practice.

You’re making such a huge range of incorrect assumptions here and I was trying to correct some of them. I’m honestly done with this conversation but it’s worth remembering that order of magnitude calculates can be off by 100,000 fold when you make the wrong assumptions.

Also, Wikipedia itself says the reading was from 8 months after the accident. “At the time of its discovery, about eight months after formation, radioactivity near the Elephant's Foot was” The falloff from 8 months post accident to now isn’t actually that large because even iodine 131 had already seen 30 half lives at that point the really nasty stuff was already gone and the reasonably long lived stuff is what was left.

Finally, fungi get by on way less energy than plants do from photosynthesis it’s really not a particularly meaningful benchmark.

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

#108

Post by Andrex »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #41
Andrex wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This lines up with a book idea I've had for like 20 years. Crazy! Don't wait to write sci-fi I suppose! Life may catch up, haha.

Idea is nothing, execution is everything. Just write it if you want to.

I will write it one day. Right now other more fully-formed creative projects are taking precedence.

I do know that when I write it it'll be a different take, because it'll be my voice and perspective and a synthesis of the media that makes me, me.

But as they say, writing is hard. :)

My parent comment deals more with the idea that some fantastical sci-fi ideas or inventions become less fantastical the longer you sit on them. The idea for a touch-based slate computer in TNG was pretty cool! Now everyone has a tablet, and that took only about 20 years.

I don't believe other literary genres have this unique problem. If I came up with a Game of Thrones-esque fantasy story, I wouldn't need to worry about the worldbuilding becoming "outdated." (Maybe in esoteric cases like dinosaurs not having feathers before we discovered that they do, etc.)

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

#109

Post by soulchild77 »

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

That Oasis tune in the 2nd trailer already ruined everything for me.

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

#110

Post by rpozarickij »

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

The audiobook narrated by Ray Porter is also really good.

In fact, it's so good that it sets a really good example of what an enjoyable experience listening to an audiobook can be.

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