A Black Fungus Might Be Healing Chernobyl by Drinking Radiation | Hacker News Reader

A Black Fungus Might Be Healing Chernobyl by Drinking Radiation

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14 pointsthunderbong10 comments

This is pure clickbait. The fungus in question thrives in high-radiation environments, but it in no way helps to clean them up or shield against the radiation. The main radiation hazard around Chernobyl is Cs-137. Its gamma emissions happen to be in an energy range that can only be shielded against by raw mass -- it makes only a small difference whether you use water, dirt, lead, or fungus -- unless you cover every square meter of ground with 100s kg of shielding, this will not make the area more livable.

Cs-137 half life seems to only be 30 years.

I assume the best solution then is just to keep an exclusion zone, and shrink it over the decades as the Cs decays?

Why did they expose so many humans (liquidators) to radiation trying to clean this up? Shouldn't they have just evacuated the area and waited a few decades?

Is the Cs-137 contamination from the original reactor disaster or is it a part of some decay chain?

> I assume the best solution then is just to keep an exclusion zone, and shrink it over the decades as the Cs decays?

That's exactly how it's handled now, but it takes several multiples of 30 years to make a real dent in the radiation levels. 200 years maybe, depending on where you set the cutoff.

> Why did they expose so many humans (liquidators) to radiation trying to clean this up? Shouldn't they have just evacuated the area and waited a few decades?

The liquidators were exposed cleaning up and building the containment unit around the actual reactor building, not working in the wider exclusion zone, where radiation levels would be much lower.

I agree. Moreover, the article cites a 2007 paper. Is there any new update or reproduction of the result?

> The disaster has been described by lawyers, academics and journalists as an example of ecocide.

I never understood this part. By all accounts the nature is blossoming in the exclusion zone. Effectively it's a natural reserve.

Another approach that has been attempted relatively recently is to dig trenches into contaminated soil after illegally invading the territory. Not sure how effective it was.

It would be interesting to see how this would fair on Mars.

EDIT: with minimal to no Oxygen it would be doubtful it would survive.

Although it muck up huge amounts of potential science if escaped from a Mars settlement.

Are space probes materialised with radiation?

Does this fungus have an upper limit to the radiation it can be exposed to?

How has this managed to evolve on Earth, or has it been surviving on normal radiation and was able to evolve to the especially intense environment of Chernobyl?

Is this found on nuclear bomb test sites, or at Fukushima?

…where “might” means “is not”; obvious clickbait (edit: as fellow comment notes)

Wikipedia entry:

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

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