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

Interesting but crappy test subject (uranium)

[Scalli0n]

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!

Ionizing radiation

[dido]

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?

nuclear energy

[decoder]

Pros:

• less expensive
• Clean: no polution
• less radiation than coal burning, unless you go swimming in the waste pools

Cons:

• waste disposal issues
• France uses it to power 77% of their country and nobody wants to be associated with those guys. (joke)

Could this be the cure to the first of the two cons? :-)

Done before...

[Keighvin]

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).

Re:Nuclear energy is clean

[bm_luethke]

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.

Re:Nuclear energy is clean

[BWJones]

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.

Re:Cure for Hiroshima/Nagasaki?

[DaveAtFraud]

They didn't have to do anything to clean them up. High intensity radioactivity can only be sustained in isotopes with a short half life. In order for something that is radioactive to keep throwing off high energy particles, gamma rays, x-rays, etc., some piece of it has to decay. As more of it decays there's less of it around to be radioactive. Besides the radiation from the actual explosions, the radioactivity was fairly intense immediately after the bombs went off but then subsided to near normal levels fairly rapidly.

I get a more intense radiation dose living in the Denver area with lots of graitic soil and living at 6,000+ ft above sea level than most of the inhabitants of Hiroshima or Nagaski get in a normal day. If I go skiing or climb a mountain, I really get nuked. So far, no spare hand growing out of my forehead but I have mutated into being more politically conservative the older I get and the longer I live here.