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That just gives you radioactive bacteria who might crawl around a bit and spread the radioactivity. You can't get rid of a nuclear problem by chemistry.
by andrewflnr 1y ago
That just gives you radioactive bacteria who might crawl around a bit and spread the radioactivity. You can't get rid of a nuclear problem by chemistry.
- ltbarcly3 1y agoYou are correct, of course, but in a sci-fi scenario maybe you could have a colony of fungi that move nuclear material around internally to keep it 'hot', thus 'burn it off' faster to extract energy. It might collect material from a wide area.
- lgats 1y agoHeat doesn't impact radioactive decay, though the sci-fi fungi could have some internal neutron reflectors that may make something interesting happen
- ltbarcly3 1y agoWell you misunderstood but also you aren't correct. Hot is commonly used to mean radioactive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_particle One mode of radioactive decay is electron capture, which is absolutely impacted by temperature (just mentioning this as trivia, I meant hot-as-in-radioactive).
- andrewflnr 1y agoMoving around radioactive material doesn't affect its activity, unless you're specifically talking about collecting it into a near-critical mass or something like that. Presumably that's what GP was thinking about wrt neutron reflectors. And I'm pretty sure that only works even in principle if the isotope in question can be stimulated into activity by absorbing neutrons (or other radiation I suppose), which is not the case for all of them. Bio-accumulating a critical mass of radioactive material ion by ion... well, it sure is sci-fi.