Microbes for Bioremediation

The San Francisco Chronicle has a piece discussing current efforts to clean up nuclear waste sites with microbes. Current treatment procedures generally involve pumping out the contaminated groundwater, filtering it, and pumping it back, which is rather expensive.

Comments

And what happens?

[Lord_Dweomer]

And what happens when these microbes mutate?

I for one welcome our new microbe overlords!

Re:And what happens?

[worst_name_ever]

I'd like to remind them that, as a Slashdot poster with Excellent karma, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground agar caves!

How about microbes to rid us of Trolls?

[Limburgher]

I'd love to see these GNAA types slowly consumed by millions of swarming microbes and converted into harmless and useful biochemicals.

Or, alternately, poo.

Bad movie idea...

[kelceylehrich]

Is this the intro to another movie?

I can see it now: radioactive germs bite a kid and he turns into a super human spiderman/hulk thing.

Great.

other uses

[pHatidic]

The waste ate its way down into layers of saprolite, a claylike rock, so that more than 99 percent of it is deep in the soil, he said.

Maybe this technology could be put to other uses. for example, what if we used old nuclear waste for drilling deep within the earth. We could pour some in the hole, and then microbe it when it stopped being effective. lather, rinse, repeat.

1. Pour nuclear waste into ground making a really really deep hole.
2. Clean up hole with microbes.
3. ????
4. Profit!

Re:other uses

[The Master Control P]

No, don't you see? The moon got blasted out of orbit when we put too much nuclear waste in one place. First the intense magnetic fields made people go insane, then waste dump number 2 exploded and hurled the moon into outer space! It all happened on September 13, 1999!

New unit of measurement

[3141]

a mountain of radioactive and toxic dirt 2,000 times larger than Egypt's Great Pyramid at Giza.

That's all very well and good, but I want to know how many Libraries of Congress that is.

Obligatory Simpsons Response

[TrollBridge]

Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

Acquisition

[FinalFantasyMook]

Where can I get some of this amazing bacteria? My bedroom had to be quarantined off two months ago when I attempted to see if I could use uranium to overclock my Pentium 2, and I forget what color the carpet is... *sniff*

I need these microbes for my bathroom...

[flicken]

...to deal with the nuculear waste products left behind by my roommates!

Duh

[fritter]

As I've learned from Saturday morning television, there has been an answer for this for years. You combine the power of the five rings to form Captain Planet, and he cleans up the nuclear waste and puts the perpetrators in jail. Sheesh, you'd think these so-called "intelligent" scientists could be bothered to turn on the TV every once in an while.

Make more bullets instead

[Anonymous Coward]

At the rate GWB is starting wars around the world we won't have any need for these microbes. Just convert all that pesky radioactive waste into armor piercing DU ammunition and fire it at those turd-world Muslimaniac turban-wearing loonies from Iraqastan who are always screwing around with our oil.

Hmmm...

[linuxwrangler]

This story was on SF Gate 2 weeks ago and I submitted it that day. The weird thing is that my submission was and still is listed as accepted but the story was never posted. Now it finally shows up.

Maybe the microbes had to chew through some bowel obstructions to allow the accepted stories to clear through. :)

Re:Ionizing radiation

[caffeine_monkey]

Tiny little lead aprons.

Nuclear+Bioterrorism?

[InfiniteWisdom]

So do we end up with a bunch or radioactive microbes then? Now you can have nuclear+bioterrorism all rolled in one easy-to-deploy package!!!

Re:Interesting but crappy test subject (uranium)

[Dr. Photo]

I can think of cooler stuff to do with microbes - like in restauraunts, have lots of microbes at the bottom of a special trash can to eat away grease (McDonalds would love that.)

Och! That's Willy's retirement grease!