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!

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!

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.

Re:Ionizing radiation

[caffeine_monkey]

Tiny little lead aprons.