May 29, 2007...8:47 am
Major biological discovery…inside the Chernobyl reactor??
The abandoned town of Pripyat, the Chernobyl reactor in the background.
There has been an exciting new biological discovery inside the tomb of the Chernobyl reactor. Like out of some B-grade sci fi movie, a robot sent into the reactor discovered a thick coat of black slime growing on the walls. Since it is highly radioactive in there, scientists didn’t expect to find anything living, let alone thriving. The robot was instructed to obtain samples of the slime, which it did, and upon examination…the slime was even more amazing than was thought at first glance.
This slime, a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using gamma radiation as a food source. Samples of these fungi grew significantly faster when exposed to gamma radiation at 500 times the normal background radiation level. The fungi appear to use melanin, a chemical found in human skin as well, in the same fashion as plants use chlorophyll. That is to say, the melanin molecule gets struck by a gamma ray and its chemistry is altered. This is an amazing discovery, no one had even suspected that something like this was possible.
Aside from its novelty value, this discovery leads to some interesting speculation and potential research. Humans have melanin molecules in their skin cells, does this mean that humans are getting some of their energy from radiation? This also implies there could be organisms living in space where ionizing radiation is plentiful. I’ve always been a big panspermia proponent, the idea that life did not originate on Earth but is actually common in the cosmos. Organisms that can live in space certainly gives more credence to this idea.
Possibly this could also be used to create plants or mushrooms that could grow in space, serving as a food source for space travellers. Maybe these fungi could be modified and used somehow to clean up radiation contaminated environments. There’s quite a few of those, in fact the disposal of radioactive waste is still a huge and unsolved problem. Now the fungi couldn’t actually eat the radioactive isotopes, I’m not saying that, but if they can live in radioactive environments they might be used to somehow scour out or concentrate the radioactive isotopes in such a way as to facilitate their clean up.
Imagine, there’s fallout from a nuclear accident and what do the guys in suits do? They show up, spray mushroom spores over everything, and a few weeks later the mushrooms are harvested and disposed of while the contaminated area is now radiation free. It would certainly be useful, the picture at the top shows the still abandoned town of Priyat, Ukraine. It was built to house the workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and was evacuated within hours of the accident.
An excellent story about the Chernobyl disaster and Pripyat is at the Ghost Town link. Just be aware that, no, Elana didn’t actually ride her motorcycle through the radiation contaminated zone, that was poetic license on her part. (Motorcycle enthusiasts have motorcycled across Europe hoping to duplicate her tour, only to be told by the guards that that motorcycles are not allowed in the contaminated zone.) The pictures and descriptions are accurate though, some of the images are incredibly poignant. Just think, a whole town where the inhabitants fled without warning, leaving all of their possessions behind.
Fortunately the Chernobyl reactor was an old and unsafe design, only one other reactor in the world was built the same way. It was right here in Berkeley, a research reactor built on campus in the fifties. It was sagely decided to quietly shut it down after Chernobyl; while it couldn’t have had an accident on the scale of Chernobyl, the locals were a little concerned anyhow. In fact it was a block away from my favourite burrito place, yikes.
(The above image was released into the public domain by its author. Credit: Jason Minshull.)
64 Comments
May 29, 2007 at 10:08 am
I don’t recall the details, but they had biological growth in the Three Mile Island reactor after the event as well. I don’t recall anything about the gamma ray mechanism, however
If you’d like a lay person’s guide to Chernobyl vs. western nuclear plants, see my novel “Rad Decision”. I’ve worked in the US nuclear industry over twenty years. Available free online at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com and also at online retailers. Stewart Brand, the noted enviornmentalist and founder of “The Whole Earth Catalog” has said: “I’d like to see ‘Rad Decision’ widely read.”
May 29, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Book Mark your book. I sure will read it and gain knowledge.
Doug your posts are always interesting.
May 31, 2007 at 11:38 am
Speaking of good burritos is Berkeley, do you like Casa Latina?
May 31, 2007 at 11:39 am
s/is/in/
May 31, 2007 at 11:43 am
Never tried it, it’s not in a part of Berkeley I frequent. I like Juan’s and La Burrita. There used to be a wonderful place called the Taqueria de Berkeley, but sadly the owner went back to Mexico.
June 1, 2007 at 11:44 am
My wife says La Burrita is a place she gets lunch sometimes, and enjoys it.
June 4, 2007 at 3:48 am
Here’s a reference to some experiments: Ionizing Radiation Changes the Electronic Properties of Melanin and Enhances the Growth of Melanized Fungi (PubMedCentral). (Courtesy of Dymanic at JREF forums)
I haven’t read the rest. I’m not a biologist.
September 21, 2007 at 10:02 am
I like how the author used fungi and bacteria interchangeably as if they were the same thing.
September 21, 2007 at 10:11 am
In the immortal words of Bill the Cat…”Ack.” Good catch, thanks for pointing that out, now fixed. :)
—Doug
September 21, 2007 at 10:15 am
Very interesting. However, I don’t envision this being used for cleanups since the organism uses the radiation passively - I.E. it doesn’t change the amount of radiation in the environment.
I think plants would be a good analogy - they use sunlight for fuel, and although the portion of the sunlight they absorb is no longer available due to their shadow, the sun itself does not dim due to usage of this energy. I’ve seen no evidence that this organism ’sucks’ the radiation from the source.
It’s still a very interesting phenomenon. Thanks for posting.
September 21, 2007 at 10:54 am
I feel like I need to merge the two topics being discussed here:
I bet those radioactive cleanup mushrooms would make a powerful veggie burrito.
September 21, 2007 at 12:04 pm
‘Now the fungi couldn’t actually eat the radioactive isotopes, I’m not saying that, but if they can live in radioactive environments they might be used to somehow scour out or concentrate the radioactive isotopes in such a way as to facilitate their clean up.’
Did you read that part Riding Siberian???
September 21, 2007 at 12:09 pm
[...] an interesting blog on reddit regarding life in highly radioactive areas (read: Chernobyl) . followed up with the reference article from science a go go (WTF?). the blog [...]
September 21, 2007 at 12:17 pm
acctually she did ride her bike in, her first site many years ago i visited explained how. her father is a researcher and because of that she got the privilege to ride through because he was high enough up to request and get her permission granted. parts of chernobyl they have tours too within the dead zone they are said to be 3-4 hours and stay in the safe zones withing the dead zone, but the public doesnt just have free access to drive on in and wonder around, elena is just one of a chosen few who will ever have that opportunity, when she started her first kiddo of speed site i found it and emailed her, she answered alot of my questions i really wish i still had the print out of it, she really was incredibly well smart and very friendly.
September 21, 2007 at 1:13 pm
So the melanin we still have may be a remnant from our panspermian radiation-eating space fungus ancestor?
September 21, 2007 at 1:28 pm
It should also be pointed out that although such fungus would be able to collect energy from the sun, they would not be able to use this mechanism to grow and repair damages. Terrestrial plants, for example, collect carbon from the air as well as other nutrients from the air and soil to grow and repair damage. These elements are void in the vacuum of space.
September 21, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Hmm… I’ve seen talks similar to this before. I think the microbes I heard about, used an increased level of H3O that occurs in the presence of high radiation, and not the radioactive rays themselves. Sure they are using a novel metabolic pathway that uses the radioactive emission directly?
September 21, 2007 at 2:04 pm
chernobyl, 20 years later: pictures, pictures, pictures (about 100) here:
http://swiss-lupe.blogspot.com/2007/04/chernobyl-21-years-later-20-bilder.html
September 21, 2007 at 2:31 pm
“…does this mean that humans are getting some of their energy from radiation?”
- isn’t the Sun a form of radiation? Do we not get energy from the Sun? Vitamin K?
September 21, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Hmmm… the movie “the andromeda strain” had life that would grow in reaction to gamma rays.
September 21, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Based on what I learned in my graduate nuclear & particle physics courses, and my radiation training at Los Alamos, no organism could take ionizing radiation and immediately convert it to ‘food’ - as you pointed out later in the column, the gamma rays help convert melanin to a usuable food source, as you remark later.
The reason (by my understanding) that it couldn’t happen this way is because that radiation can’t just disappear (matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed), but has to be converted to something. Gamma radiation is pure photons, higher energy than both UV and X-rays, and would likely knock electrons from an atom, also called beta radiation, which is less unsafe but still can be ionizing itself. That is probably the reason why they saw the chemical melanin conversion - knocking the electron(s) off means you have a total positive charge on an atom, & would allow a chemical combination that wasn’t possible before (remember the valence rules from chemistry). So I suspect that slime is itself a beta emitter, and as such it would absolutely not be safe to eat - about the worst thing you can do is to ingest a radiation source. Beta can typically be stopped by clothing or paper, or your skin, but if you put it inside your body it will start creating those free radicals and it will make you extremely sick, and quite possibly kill you.
Someone please pipe up if I’m wrong as I haven’t looked at any of this stuff in probably at least 10 years :)
September 21, 2007 at 3:44 pm
I just love the way you so confidently say she didn;t ride her bike through. Clearly you haven’t looked at her pictures, as her bike features in several of them, plus her night-shots are illuminated by a single headlight.
You simply don’t understand that you can have anything you want with the right bribe. They say “No Bike!”, you say “How Much?” Then the trouble is over, and off you go, after some haggling.
Interesting about the fungus though.
I too believe panspermia is possible.
September 21, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Everybody knows the best burrito in Berkeley is “Gordo Taqueria” on College and Ashby.
September 21, 2007 at 5:30 pm
What scientific publication can you quote as reference for this amazing discovery ?
None.
Why ? Because what you are saying is nonsense, and the numerous errors in your text prove it.
But hey, it sounds like the perfect synopsis for a cheesy movie.
September 21, 2007 at 5:39 pm
I don’t see how any of this could help contain radioactive waste. Just because these spores thrive in radioactive environment doesn’t mean they physically gather the radioactive particles, they’re simply present. Even if they did gather the particles, that solves nothing. The problem is not the particles, it’s the rays. Also, the reactor at Kozloduy, Bulgaria, is of the same type as the one in Chernobyl. That’s a correction to your statement that the only other such reactor in the world was built at Berkeley.
September 21, 2007 at 7:08 pm
Well, I strive for accuracy, but this is a blog where I post daily, sometimes errors creep in. Always happy to correct them, I’m embarrassed that I mixed up fungi and bacteria, I know they aren’t the same thing, I should have caught that.
I did research Elana’s purported journey and the consensus on the web is that she used poetic licence, none of the shots of her and her motorcycle are in clearly identifiable Chernobyl locations as I recall. I certainly could be wrong, I took the stand I took to avoid people saying “Her story is a hoax.” Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. :)
Didn’t know that about Kozloduy, I stand corrected.
The link to where I got this story is in the first line, this isn’t a scientific journal and I make no claims as such.
I was not suggesting that this fungus could clean up radiation by using it, I merely meant to point out that if a fungus can survive in the presence of such radiation, maybe there might be a way to utilize such in radiation clean up. Idle speculation only, I wasn’t proposing any actual mechanism for such.
Comments always appreciated. —Doug
September 21, 2007 at 7:22 pm
[...] Major biological discovery…inside the Chernobyl reactor?? « Doug’s Darkworld (tags: darwinism engineering nature chernobyl science biology) [...]
September 21, 2007 at 8:07 pm
“[...] the picture at the top shows the still abandoned town of Priyat, Ukraine. It was built to house the workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and was evacuated within hours of the accident.”
If by “within hours” you mean “within 35 hours”.. it took them over a full day to start evacuating the city. Meanwhile, the population roasted.
September 21, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Go rent “The Blob” (the original’s still the best).
September 22, 2007 at 7:03 am
@unitedcats
Dude, you cannot state that a scientific discovery has been made if you cannot produce any scientific publications to prove it. It’s not serious. Plus, no organism can sustain itself in 500 times the natural gamma radiation. It’s impossible.
@yatpay
The population was evacuated in 48 hours. The amount of radiation they received is comprised between 0.1 and 1 Gy, which is no way lethal nor really pathological.
Cernobyl was a disaster, it had grave and far reaching consequences (Especially in Belarus and Ukraine), but the population of Prypiat was relatively unharmed, as incredible as it may seem.
September 22, 2007 at 10:27 am
To those who dismissed this because Doug didn’t include a reference to the research paper immediately obvious to skimming eyes - perhaps you should have thought before protesting.
1) The link he included to ScienceAGoGo references the research paper.
2) A response to this blog posting in June had a link to the NIH index of the article abstract, which linked to the research paper.
3) The topic was elsewhere in the news in May, and was covered on a variety of news sources and blogs, including Scientific American, Slashdot, Science Daily, Scientific Blogging, (OK, I’ve gotten tired of doing your bibliographic research for you).
and
4) OK, I’ll repeat the link to the research paper in the Public Library Of Science journal ONE (PloS ONE):
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000457
September 22, 2007 at 10:44 am
Here I think is a detailed article on the subject
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000457
September 23, 2007 at 7:55 am
[...] Fungus that feeds directly on radiation. You know, like how plants feed directly on sunlight, just a different wavelength. A wavelength that just happens to be terribly deadly to just about everything else known to man. Beyond the basic science fact, the article is mostly conjecture and speculation, but an interesting collection of ideas nonetheless… [...]
September 23, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Oh, sure. Fungi that eat radiation. I take it you’re not all that familiar with Russian “science”. Add in a dose of panspermia support and the credibility needle has broken off the gauge and is rattling around inside the meter.
Yawn.
September 23, 2007 at 6:59 pm
[...] a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using gamma radiation as a food source. Samples of these fungi grew significantly faster when exposed to gamma radiation at 500 times the [...]
September 24, 2007 at 4:38 pm
http://www.aecom.yu.edu/home/news/PRdetails.asp?isPR=1&id=356
Link to the original study, slightly different than the story, but the data seems right.
September 25, 2007 at 12:13 pm
[...] Science A Go Go: Chernobyl Fungus Feeds on Radiation Blog: Major biological discovery…inside the Chernobyl reactor?? [...]
September 26, 2007 at 12:39 am
Someone said here that the fungus wouldn’t clean up the radiation any more than a plant cleans up the sun shine.. just leaves a shadow.
So: What happens if you grow the fungus so that it covers the whole source of radiation? It still radiates, but if the fungus absorbs the radiation it shouldn’t bother anyone.
Lets grow giant mushrooms on nuclear waste sites!
September 26, 2007 at 7:07 am
I’m curious… does the Fungi output Oxygen or conduct Oxygen rich conversion? If it does, what are the possibilities or utilizing it for terraforming needs? What a delicious development. ;-)
September 26, 2007 at 11:25 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK says there were 17, and one still being build, not “only one similar, in Berkeley”
September 29, 2007 at 7:08 am
[...] clipped from unitedcats.wordpress.com [...]
September 29, 2007 at 1:10 pm
[...] Fontes: Science A gogo Wikipedia Doug´s Darkworld [...]
September 29, 2007 at 5:41 pm
[...] Major biological discovery…inside the Chernobyl reactor?? via Doug’s Darkworld: a collection of fungi that eat gamma rays? (tags: biology chernobyl evolution nuclear russia science panspermia research) [...]
October 5, 2007 at 5:01 pm
all of the links from this site are blocked by the web filter installed on this machine…the government must not want me to know about the radiation slime…
Oh and a thought - that slime would make a pretty sweet nuclear/biological weapon if it were actually served as a burrito…
October 19, 2007 at 7:34 am
If you want to know another disaster reactor, check out Rancho Seco in Sacramento. They had a number of accidents, some of which spread radioactive material in that area. I speculate that far in the future people will think it was a really stupid idea to split the atom.
October 30, 2007 at 4:44 pm
[...] en blogg hittade jag en länk till en sida som publicerar artiklar om forskning. Enligt artikeln där har [...]
November 23, 2007 at 6:14 pm
No..no..no. How can i take your story credibily when it is full of un-truths. To pick out a couple,- Pripyat was not ‘evacuated hours after the disaster’ think more THREE DAYS, also the Chernobyl plant was not the only plant to use ‘old and unsafe designs’ there were plenty more RBMK reactors built in the USSR.
December 21, 2007 at 5:03 am
I like how the author used fungi and bacteria interchangeably as if they were the same thing
December 21, 2007 at 8:12 am
I corrected that when it was first pointed out, it was a rather obvious mistake. You must have read it on a feed or something that never updates. —Doug
February 2, 2008 at 2:57 am
Bacteria has been found in South Africa’s deepest gold mines in new shafts. The area has not been exposed to the surface for at least 3billion yrs.
The bottom of the food chain is a bacterium, ‘Desulfotomaculum ‘ which absorbs energy from the uranium ore in the mine and then uses the energy to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. Other bacteria exist that live off of the the “atom eaters”
March 19, 2008 at 9:45 pm
“Imagine, there’s fallout from a nuclear accident and what do the guys in suits do? They show up, spray mushroom spores over everything, and a few weeks later the mushrooms are harvested and disposed of while the contaminated area is now radiation free.”
Half-life?
March 19, 2008 at 9:50 pm
This is a good article.
The process of collecting/mining a substance using an organism such as a plant is called Phytoremediation or phytomining
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoremediation
Humans already use Ultraviolet light to convert Cholesterol in the skin to Vitamin D
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D#Production_in_the_skin
The notion of humans obtaining energy from the sun is novel but flawed, as the ionising radiation altering the Melanin would also cause mutation of the host’s DNA and therefore cancer.
Lots and lots of cancer.
March 19, 2008 at 10:22 pm
nuclear power produces a small amount of radiation but a large amount of radioactive waste, which is released into the environment twice weekly. unfilterable gas is emitted into the air.
this causes thousands of deaths every year. I would put a moratorium on all nuclear power in Massachusetts and on building new coal power plants if elected to the House of Representatives. I ask every state to do the same.
March 20, 2008 at 2:47 am
Interesting article, but as Martin somewhere above said: the chernobyl reactor design isn’t quite as unusual as you try to make believe, but was the standard sowjet design for quite a time.
March 20, 2008 at 3:46 am
And to think God created all of this.
March 20, 2008 at 3:47 am
Extreme Evolution: This slime, a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using **gamma radiation** as a food source… | Deliggit.com
\r\nThe story is actually about burrito places in Berkeley and fungi that th
March 20, 2008 at 8:23 am
This is absolutely fascinating. I think you do a good job exploring the possibilities of such a discovery. Life has been found living off sulfur vents deep in the ocean, but life that lives off radiation has much more practical application potential. Cool stuff.
March 20, 2008 at 8:15 pm
You mention Panspermia,
I’ve never got the logic behind panspermia.
Panspermia proponents that I have talked to in person, admitatly only 1 or 2 people, always have been simpathetic to young earth creationists in their belief that the odds of life spontainously being created from nothing are slim. But how is it that some other planet is necessary to create life from nothing? What other planet, besides this one where life flourishes, would be some ideal starting planet for life? Wouldn’t the best chance for biogenisis be a planet with a flourishing ecosystem?
Certainly if Mars was found to have fossilized life, the argument that Mars life could have been created by panspermia from Earth holds much more weight then the reverse.
March 21, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Well, most of the liquid water on earth is thought to have cometary origin, along with other building blocks of life, which are found throughout the universe… Panspermia doesn’t mean life came from Mars or vice versa. All is full of life, perhaps.
March 28, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Great. Now, if we could spray a threatening asteroid with a fine blend of chernobyl, black slime soup, and a dash of atmosphere the surface would grow over time into a nice flat black paddock. Yarkovsky effect could then push it to a new orbit, saving Earth.
April 1, 2008 at 9:16 am
Dan,
You’re insane…try Monte Cristo Taqueria on University between Sacramento and Acton….oh yeah, Elena’s the shit.
April 4, 2008 at 12:13 pm
it used to be taqueria morelia down
san leandro boulevard toward the coliseum.
April 7, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Hey, sounds like this could be something useful in the near future. I wonder how it would react under different heat temperatures?
Eugene-
May 12, 2008 at 11:26 pm
I find it both encouraging and amazing how tenacious and unstoppable life really is. We get the idea that life is very vulnerable and easily destroyed because individual organisms are easy to kill. Just dump a little pollution into a river and something dies. Some species, like the Spotted Owl, seem so fragile that if you just look at one cross-eyed from a mile away, it will fall out of the tree dead and go extinct.
But in the big scheme of things, life is unbelievably relentless and innovative and indestructable. All kinds of exotic species live around volcanic vents — “black smokers” — at the bottom of the ocean. Drillers have found bacteria living in rocks two miles down. Other bacteria live in the boiling pools at Yellowstone. And now we find fungi that thrive in the conditions inside a nuclear reactor. That seems fitting, somehow.
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