91–100 of 113 posts
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
But the half life of the atoms is still the same, no? The bacteria and fungi harness the radioactivity, but it’s not that they “get rid” of the radioactive material.
But the half life of the atoms is still the same, no? The bacteria and fungi harness the radioactivity, but it’s not that they “get rid” of the radioactive material.
So "eat" was a bit of a poetic choice for the title really haha. It "eats" energy. Pretty good deal for the mold considering the radiation is going to be produced whether they "eat" it or not, for a VERY long time!
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!
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).
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 reac…
It has not actually been proven that this fungus gets energy from the radiation itself. They simply observe it growing faster in the presence of radiation which could be caused by any number of other things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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...]
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the fungus accumulated radioactive particles in vesicles? Might they create chained reactions and thus deplete the radioactivity faster than spatially separated particles? Might that be plausible?
Theoretically yes, as long as the isotopes are themselves fissile and susceptible to chain reactions. E.g. U-235 is (obviously, since it's fission reactor fuel) but, say, Iodine-131 undergoes beta decay. That electron can't get into another I-131 atom and cause another decay there like neutrons do in U-325. So piling up I-131 won't get it going faster. In principle if fungi could somehow concentrate enough fissionabl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also this is how the protomolecile from The Expanse feeds. It can absorb pretty much any radiation across the whole spectrum.
I was thinking the same thing. That one accelerates its growth in the presence of radiation. But it also seeks out human flesh and brains to build its biomass intelligence blob, unfortunately.
The reason so many were infected on Eros was because humans deliberately infected everyone on the station. Likewise with the human/protomolecule hybrids.