Fungi that eats radiation found inside Chernobyl reactor | Hacker News Reader

Fungi that eats radiation found inside Chernobyl reactor

foxnews.com

66 pointsNoRagrets38 comments

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus, which I’m guessing is the source article for this piece.

Not really that much of a “shocker”, as the research is decades in at this point.

Yeah, discovered all the way back in 1991.

It is still really cool. As a physicist, with a lot of contacts to nuclear physics, I can't recall hearing about any biological systems (aside from humans) making deliberate beneficial use of gamma radiation.

With sufficient evolution, one could imagine a biological system that could sustain itself for long durations in spaceflight with only a gamma source for "food". Such an organism could travel far and wide.

That's a big part of the storyline of The Expanse book series.

I was thinking something similar: Can we farm this organism? Could intergenerational ships of humans travel between stars, if they had gamma based farms?

Same line of thought here.

If you read the article they linked to the source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677413/

Also, it's shocking to me, did you already know about this?

After some research we don't seem to know everything about this fungi and it seems to have amazing potential for possible nuclear waste disposal.

They don't eat the radioactive material. They eat the radiation. I don't think this helps disposal.

This funig does not diggest the radioactive material. It diggest the rays produced by radioactive material decaying. The radioation emitted is similar to light for a plant for this fungi. If this fungi diggests radioactive material, my guess would be, that it would die- surrounded by its decendants, who would fare pretty well in the sunshine of their spore creator.

You could possibly surround the material with the fungi to naturally absorb the gamma radiation.

Also some genetic modification to the fungi may yield interesting results.

Lead would work a lot better.

Lead doesn't convert it to chemical energy.

Seems like a waste if we can use the decay...

Also, this fungi could be infinitely cheaper and much greener than lead...

The amount of energy lost in this circumstance is too small to invest effort into reclaiming it.

It is unlikely to be both cheaper than lead and equally reliable.

One day we may find a commercial use for this, but replacing lead with fungi in this context is not likely.

Or you could go with a substance that both stops radiation AND extracts the energy, used in every nuclear reactor: water. It's not quite as good as lead but pretty good, and it will heat up while stopping the radiation, then conveniently through convection can transport itself to a point where the energy can get extracted.

Water extracts thermal radiation at the infrared wavelength, not the higher energy wavelengths that these fungi eat. (X-ray, and Gamma).

Funny enough, these little critters are actually found in reactor pools.

Yah, the language of "eat radiation" is fraught with confusion.

> However in fungi, it reportedly absorbed radiation and converted it into some type of chemical energy for growth.

So the actual mechanism is more in line with photosynthesis, maybe call it radiosynthesis for a similar process outside of the visible spectrum. I'm not even sure what frequencies plants absorb light energy.

I flagged this because it's garbage reporting on something that was published in 2007[1] and 2008[2].

1: https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070521/full/news070521-5.ht...

2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677413/

I see a great deal of garbage reporting on HN that doesn't get removed.

I was previously unaware of this fungi and I appreciate the discussion occuring.

Tangentially related to this, I remember in the late 80's hearing about bacteria that ate nuclear material, drastically reducing the half life of plutonium. I assume that research went nowhere since thirty years later, we don't hear about it.

Does anyone remember this or know anything about it?

Nothing can reduce radioactive half-life. It's a constant value for each isotope. If you found a way, you would have rewritten physics as we know it.

Technically you could add or remove neucleons to change which isotope (or element) you've got, which would change the half-life. EG running a nuclear reactor changes the half-life of the fuel rod, by changing the materials in the fuel rod.

Now we just need to engineer ourselves an organism incorporating a nuclear reactor. Are there any absolute showstoppers thermodynamics wise that would prevent such a thing?

Unlike many other isotopes, if you can concentrate plutonium you can reduce its half life dramatically while increasing radioactivity.

This reminds me of the mycologist Paul Stamets' proposal to use radiotrophic fungi to clean up Fukushima.

https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/using-fungi-remediat...

Further on "mycoremediation":

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

My biased view is that fungi-based technology is an under-appreciated field with great potential for growth and wide range of applications.

Is this our version of the protomolecule? When do we send Joe Miller to investigate?

Plants "eat" radiation, too.

It's a flashy headline, but fairly meaningless.

> fairly meaningless

Plants photosynthesise visible light. These fungi “use the pigment melanin to convert gamma radiation into chemical energy for growth” [1].

That’s a meaningful difference.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

The next line in that paragraph:

> This proposed mechanism may be similar to anabolic pathways for the synthesis of reduced organic carbon (e.g., carbohydrates) in phototrophic organisms, which convert photons from visible light with pigments such as chlorophyll whose energy is then used in photolysis of water to generate usable chemical energy (as ATP) in photophosphorylation or photosynthesis.

Again, I don't find it surprising that an organism has managed to metabolize a form of EM radiation, as plants serve as a handy example of evolving to do precisely that.

Perhaps the ionizing nature of Chernobyl's radiation helps generate more selection pressure towards it, even.

With all problems we have radioactive fungi is what we need the most

Please don't post articles from foxnews. They target lowball intelligence; I find it insulting to the hackernews community.

Can you define "lowball intelligence?" That seems like a bigoted term and probably violates HN rules.

Yes, I flagged that bigoted comment, as it is the kind of comment that encourages flame wars.

‘Lowball intelligence’ I am going to assume that was directed towards me. I posted this link. Because I have a ‘farm’ suffix instead of ‘GitHub’ suffix with handle.

I picked this handle to apply to YC twice for Ag robotics. And I am proud of it. And was told that there is no money in Ag. That’s ok. We..lowball intelligences..will continue to feed everyone irrespective of who they are or what they do. Or whatever high intelligence reading list that needs perusing. Please carry on. The world needs its next Tinder crushing app. Because. Priorities.

I might be a lowballer myself. I'm not a fan of Fox News, or any legacy media for that matter, but I take umbrage to the idea that the source dictates the recipient. CNN consistently inflates and mislabels information to fit a narrative, but that doesn't mean the people watching are by necessity failing at reasoning.

Keep posting. The bar for HN is "interesting topics." This absolutely qualified. Also, keep the faith. Food is the great leveller. The world will probably come back around to appreciating those that give it to us.

On HN, we go by article quality, not site quality. Most major media sites are penalized on HN, but most also produce the occasionally interesting article.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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