Comment by apo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Radiotrophic fungi were discovered in 1991 growing inside and around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.[1]

The original study is open access and is worth reading. Here's an interesting little review:

> The literature already contains some indirect evidence for the notion that radiation can enhance the growth of melanized microorganisms. For example, the melanotic fungus C. cladosporioides manifests radiotropism by growing in the direction of radioactive particles and this organism has become widely distributed in the areas surrounding Chernobyl since the nuclear accident in 1986 [7]. Both in the laboratory and in the field several other species of melanized fungi grew towards soil particles contaminated with different radionuclides, gradually engulfing and destroying those particles [35], [36]. In addition, there are recent reports that certain life forms can utilize non-conventional forms of energy - microbes in geothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean can harvest thermal radiation as an energy source [37] while some microorganisms living in mines exploit energy from radiolysis of water [38]. On the basis of these precedents and the results of this study we cautiously suggest that the ability of melanin to capture electromagnetic radiation combined with its remarkable oxidation-reduction properties may confer upon melanotic organisms the ability to harness radiation for metabolic energy. The enhanced growth of melanotic fungi in conditions of radiation fluxes suggests the need for additional investigation to ascertain the mechanism for this effect.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1866175/

In particular the part about growing towards contaminated particles, "engulfing and destroying" them, seems like a finding with enormous practical potential.

No known biological process can "destroy" a radioactive isotope...

I wonder what they mean... Perhaps they simply mean "break up"

I guess the papers they cite are in Russian, so maybe someone else can dig into it more, but at least they link to abstracts in English [1,2] which say

> Two ways of radioactive particles destruction by C. cladosporioides were established, one of them is a direct way by fungal overgrowth of hot particles and the second one an indirect way only by fungal metabolites.

> It has been found out for the first time that Cladosporium cladosporioides and Penicillium roseo-purpureum are able actively overgrow "hot" particles whose radioactivity did not exceed 3.1-1.0(-7) Ci by gamma-spectrum and to destroy them 50-150 days later.

So it seems that the fungus forms a layer around the particle?

[1] https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/12664550 [2] https://europepmc.org/abstract/med/1753889

With "destroy" you mean turning something radio-active in something non-radio-active?

That would mean the fungus is capable of nuclear transmutation.

I’d highly doubt that.

I too was fascinated by that statement. How does it destroy them? Is it extracting energy faster than would be let off in vacuum? Or is it an encapsulation?

I presume that the fungi grow toward the source of radioactivity until they engulf it, and it is not destroyed, but instead segregated and more easily separable from the environment by bio-accumulation.

I.e. if you seed radioactive soil with radiotrophic fungi, wait a few years, and then mechanically separate fungus from soil particles, the separated soil would be less radioactive than it had been previously.

Presumably, though, other surrounding places will be more radioactive than before?

The fungus itself will be more radioactive than background.

I don't believe neutron activation is significant anywhere on Earth outside the containment of a fission reactor, power research facilities, or nuclear bomb tests. So mostly, places slowly become less radioactive over time unless you get radioactive particulates from one of the aforementioned sources, or from a natural concentration, and release them into the environment somewhere.

Bio-accumulation can occur, such as the naturally radioactive potassium in a banana, but that's just shifting around the radioactive materials already present in the environment.

Wherever you dump the fungus, or the ashes of the fungus, will be more radioactive than before. So a bio-remediation plan would likely grow fungus, separate most of it from the soil, and allow the remaining fraction to regrow, repeating as necessary. The separated fungus would be burned, and any radioactive fractions removed from the exhaust gases and dissolved in liquid or crystallized somehow. The ash would be vitrified into glass pellets.

And then it'd probably still be less radioactive than an asphalt parking lot. But okay, seal it all up inside a drum and forget about it for 10000 years anyway.

Circulate it within a semi-closed system full of funghi. A reverse breeder reactor - a condensing decayer. Vent excess material to radiology equipment.

Then sprinkle in some high-melanin humans, to grow your very own super-mutant facility personel. Perhaps also feed them mushrooms, to speed up the adaptation process.

The next generation will be... autotrophic?

You must have never went to a place with active radon gas venting... Or to the mountains.

Of course significant is in eye of the beholder, but those places do exceed typical background doses a lot.

Uranium -> thorium -> radium -> radon -> ... -> lead is a natural decay chain that does not typically activate other atoms to become unstable, so the decay energy between uranium and lead represents all the radioactivity there will ever be from that uranium. You can't predict exactly when it will be released, and because radon is a gas, you can't as easily predict where it will be released, but once you get to stable lead, it's done.

If you tack up a slab of any stable nucleus higher than iron on the nuclear binding energy curve to the inside walls of a neutron chain-reaction reactor, you can probably get it to absorb neutrons of the appropriate speed and become unstable, promising future radioactivity with an amount of energy between its current state and whatever its final decay product may be. That may be less total energy than the difference between uranium and lead, but it probably runs faster from start to finish than billions of years, and is probably more energy than the absorbed neutron.

So aside from natural reactors, which mostly shut down a long time ago, the only increases in radioactive potential are going to be from human-built reactors. The radon is just moving primordial radioactive potential from where the radium is, which is also where the uranium or thorium is, to wherever heavier-than-air gases can accumulate. If you remove the radium, you stop that. If you encapsulate the radium in a glass that traps gas, you stop that.

Mostly, we don't bother trying to remove trace amounts of uranium and other radioactive isotopes from mineral resources, but if a fungus could do it cheaply, it could make coal ash less dangerous to process and store.

Degrade would be a better word. In other words, break down organic material into simpler molecules and use them as a source of respiration, releasing radioactive carbon as CO2 and, potentially, radioactive isotopes as compounds that are gaseous or water soluble. This is the normal action of fungi.

The particles in question are likely dust specks, and destroying them probably just means breaking them up into smaller pieces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com