Slashdot Mirror
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.
I think that microbes are a great idea, in theory, but what about when they aren't in use?
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.)
Or even a microbe spray to degrease stuff; cool, huh? No more wiping down.
Also cool would be microbes in my toilet, to eat my shit (but not die.)
Of course, I do wonder what they'd do while they weren't eating shit or grease or whatever, but who cares about that, they're cool!
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
But the real question is, how well does it work? Can this convert a nuclear waste zone into a habitable zone? This is great news for the environmentalists.
YAFIRL (Yet another Free iPods referral link)
it starts with the microbes 'consuming' uranium... ok, what does the microbe do with it? it's still radioactive and now your microbe is also!
then i get to the part where the microbe is taking water based uranium and making a solid form. ok.
don't you still have to dig this stuff up? wouldn't the 'solid' form break down after a while and still have the problem? and wouldn't the solid form still have the same amount of radioactivity?
it looks like it makes it easier to get it out of soil, but you still have to dig it up and process it out?
eric
I wonder how is it that the ionizing radiation doesn't manage to kill off these microbes before they can do their job? A typical gamma ray goes for 5 MeV, whereas a typical ionization energy is only at 15-20 eV. Interfering with chemical reactions necessary to life most definitely. Mutation and more likely outright killing of these organisms.
How do they survive?
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
This actually has something in common with the Stephenson novel "Zodiac". Everyone should go read it. You can buy it here
It is a widely held misconception that exposure to a radioactive substance will 'mutate' normal objects into some radioactive thing. This is almost exclusively untrue. The exception is when material are exposed over long periods to *hard* radiation you may have some amount of nuclear interaction with the decay products of the original substance. Flying off neutrons is what causes the fission chain reaction after all. However, Uranium nuclei are very large, and as they are naturally radioactive, unstable on their own. Also recall that atoms are mostly empty space, nuclear reactions in otherwise stable materials aren't terribly common.
I am not a nuclear physicist. But i can call a couple of friends if i need to:)
Well, I am a pool operator by trade, lifeguard by profession, and the ways to filter water ALWAYS contaminate. If they use sand filters, you get a lot of radioactive sand. If you use cartridge filters, you have alot of radioactive paper. Diatomaceous Earth filters are probably out of the question. There are probably others. I assume that by filtering, they are trying to transfer the radioactivity to the filter media. I don't know the specifics, but the process is either designed so that A) Environmentalists will quit their bitching about the immediate threat to the environment,or B) The filters can lose their dangerous radiation levels afetr a few days, so long term disposal is not an issue. I am pretty sure the filter plan just deals with the immediate threat that irradiated ground water is dangerous, but relies on careful, long-term storage for the objects doing the cleaning.
But yeah, I probably was wrong about it creating more waste water, although the water will never be *truly* clean again. Filters can't garuntee that. They can just specify a percent that leaves only a safe amount of radiation.
"What will happen when the the oil is gone? What are they going to do? Die, or find something else?" So I would think the same with will happen.
Engineer in promoters for certain compounds that must be present for the organism to live. No sustaining compound....microbes die. This is very common in the lab, and I could imagine other potential applications such as radio frequency induced promoters that would trigger pre-programmed apoptosis pathways to eliminate bacteria when the job is accomplished.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
We do suck at assesing risk. We think that 1 soldier a day dying in Iraq is so bad, whereas that death rate is lower than the murder rate in Washington,D.C. or close to it. We also don't let kids play tag or football or dodgeball, because we have to protect them from every little thing. Parents form what resemble emergency room triage teams when a kid skins his knee playing soccer. It pisses me off.
I can appreciate where you are coming from. I don't think that all pro-nuke/anti-environment folks are out to wipe out humanity in some evil scheme (though you'd think that was all they were interested in).
Basically we are all in this boat together and we've got to do what we can to keep it afloat. So you and me, we're on the same side, we're just arguing over implementation details. It is a far cry from us arguing over whether the correct alternative energy source ought to be nuclear or otherwise to the neocon opinion that all is right with the world and environmental action need not be taken immediately.
In the end we need to weigh the risks, as you pointed out. I don't have the stomach for the risks posed by nuclear power, and so I will continue with the NIMBY (think globally, act locally) opinions that I've got. Too often this lack of weighing the risks of things carries over into other parts of our daily lives, whether it is something comples like choosing to fluoridate water supplies instead of trying to prevent cancer in population centers or something simpler like deciding between the simple but feature-lacking vi and the buggy but feature-laden Emacs.
The bacteria doesn't get rid of the radiation, just makes the radioactive slush insoluble so that they can collect it and deal with it with less cost. It's a great idea.
I'm just hoping that some genious comes up with a safe way to speed up the nuclear decomposition so that the material stabilizes into non-radioactive elements. That will be a breakthrough!
--==-- I've found Karma to be a relative thing... Ya know, the kind you invite to Christmas...
Pros:
Cons:
Could this be the cure to the first of the two cons?
Radioactivity doesn't just go away... it is not a chemical reaction, but physical instability in the nucleus of the uranium.. This may chemically break down uranium... but still. the microbes will be exposed to toxic amounts of radiation (by human standards). This is what is dangerous about uranium... where as it may be toxic as a chemical it is also radioactively toxic. the microbes might be able to break it all down into uranite. but it seems they are only dealing w/ microbes as a way to chemcially treat stable uranium...
still doesn't solve the question of radioactive waste does it?
This was done before on a test site near the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington (state), US. Only with that, they used the population of microbes already in the area that needed methane in order to properly metabolize the contaminated elements. They pumped a continuous stream of methane into the ground to help the microbes thrive and do their job, and when finished simply turned it off and let them return to natural levels.
A simple control mechanism such as that, especially using elements already found in nature, will be far more acceptable to the general public (fed on many a recent techno-thriller) as well as the tin-foil-beanie crowd (though just barely).
Any spoon would be too big.
Oak ridge has tought us very many things, of those nuclear power is unclean is not one of them.
First, the ecology of the area is quite robust. A lot of wildlife - on the road into the lab deer are populated enough that nearly two are killed every week crossing the road, turkey's have become so overpopulated that they are opening the preservation up for hunting (previously only animals large enough to damage property were allowed to hunt), and Melton Hill lake is swimable and the fish are edible (above a certain point - though that point is for bacterial not nuclear).
Also Oak ridges issue, as stated in the article, is from the 40's and 50's when they thought that putting the waste in barrels at the bottom of a pond was good enough, or pouring stuff on the ground was good. As far as I know that is not standard practice today. This has to do with nuclear bomb production back in the early days, it's not even relevent to current weapons research (which is produces much worse waste than a power plant).
Oak Risge still produces some of the most radioactive stuff in the world (at the HFIR http://www.ornl.gov/hfir/hfirhome.html ) and does so qutie safely - I've looked in the holding tank at stuff glowing quite brightly (medical isotopes being produced) so it is definatly on going production.
Modern plants are quite efficient and do not produce near the waste that they used to - in fact, a large portion of thier material is recyclable back into the plant or into other useful materials. Coal is MUCH worse for the environment than nuclear power. Total impact - with materials cost, waste, and output - nuclear plants are one of, if not the best, solutions for power in all geographical areas.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Nuclear energy IS clean.
And don't forget that burning coal high in uranium can release into the atmosphere as much radiation every day as was released by the Three Mile Island leak. Just look to the big coal plant in central Utah for an example.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I've lived in Oak Ridge. Very nice area...very clean for Eastern Tennessee standards. Lots of trees, rivers, etc. Everything was very professional, and I never heard of any problems regarding radioactive waste. Heck, even their speed limit signs have kilometers per hour on them!
a in.html
In contrast, travel 10 miles outside of Oak Ridge back in the redneck hills, and you'll see all sorts of trash. Empty motor oil bottles, dead batteries, lighter fluid containers, etc, all sitting in the middle of streams. Seeing that, the *last* thing you'll ever think is "Did Oak Ridge dump a few pounds of radioactive waste in the ground?" Worst of all, these redneck towns still keep their speed limit signs in miles per hour!!!!
By the way, Oak Ridge National Labratory did a very nice study comparing the huge amounts of radioactive emissions from coal power plants compared to nuclear powered plants. Check it out here: http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/colm
This is nanotechnology; biotech vs. nanotech is to some degree an artificial distinction. Bacteria are nanomachines (well, okay, micromachines; viruses are nanomachines) that are already very good at what they do, and can me made to do what we want them to do, in many cases, with just a few tweaks. I think it's a red herring to imagine that useful nanotech will consist solely, or even mostly, of entirely new machines built up atom-by-atom to resemble the machines we use in the macroscopic world. Life has already produced mechanisms that work very well on a small scale; as we learn more about how to manipulate it, we will learn more about how to adapt biological mechanisms to our uses.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Good comment - As usual the newspaper article simplifies the entire story a little bit. I do not now any case where microbes actually are pumped into the ground. If you use a specific strain then you keep them in a bioreactor and pump & treat the contaminated groundwater in these facilities. Otherwise it is most likely that they just die.
The bioremediation research have to show that there actually is a bug that does the job - a proof of BIO-remediation. Hey, and if they once identified the bug they also can name it... And then they define which conditions can keep these bugs happy. Oxygen might just be the right stuff for them.
However, the bioremediation story with U is a kind of complicated, because U is not just floating around lonely, but usually is associated with a whole bunch of stuff. Typically there are also many detergents and complexing agents that keep the radioactive metals soluble. Especially NTA and EDTA (also used in washing detergents), known to be quite persistent, and as long these are present the dissolved U is stabilised. You need to show under what conditions the complexing agents can be degraded and then in addition how U can be precipitated. There's quite a bit of research going on for many years. Just check out google with the keywords "in-situ bioremediation groundwater radioactive"
(Yep, I know this could be a very sophisticated link - I am new here, so let me some time to get use to the HTML tag stuff.)