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

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.