life is everywhere

[Kulapavana]

Bacteria found in Hanford waste

Toxic radioactive soil below leaking tank unlikely place for life

 

By TOM PAULSON

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

 

Scientists studying the soil beneath a leaking Hanford nuclear waste storage tank have discovered more than 100 species of bacteria living in a toxic, radioactive environment that most would have thought inhospitable to all forms of life.

 

"Even in some of the most contaminated zones, we found a few living organisms," said Fred Brockman, a microbial ecologist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland. Brockman is presenting the findings today at the American Society for Microbiology's annual meeting in New Orleans.

 

For most living creatures, the nuclear and chemical waste in the underground storage tanks on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is the deadliest mixture of toxins and radioactive muck on the planet.

 

For certain bacteria, however, this toxic goop left over from decades of nuclear weapons production appears to be just a second home.

 

"Scientifically, it's pretty interesting stuff," said Jim Fredrickson, Brockman's colleague on this project and a fellow microbiologist at the lab. "The material in the tank is self-boiling and quite hot, so it's not just radioactive and harsh chemicals but also in extreme heat."

 

The waste in the Hanford tanks is made up of highly radioactive cesium, strontium and various other toxic chemicals left over from the World War II bomb works. About 53 millions gallons was stored in 177 underground tanks, some of which have leaked an estimated 1 million gallons into the surrounding soil of the Columbia Basin.

 

The U.S. Department of Energy now wants to empty and close 40 single-shelled Hanford tanks by 2006. Critics of the department and state Ecology officials are concerned that this could be too hasty an agenda and divert energy or resources from the massive clean-up effort still needed to protect against further environmental contamination.

 

Brockman, Fredrickson and their colleagues piggybacked their microbial studies on efforts by DOE and its waste tank managers to track the leaks. They asked to study sediment samples collected in 2000 from boreholes dug around one of the leaking tanks.

 

"I believe this is the most radioactive soil that's ever been looked at for microorganisms," Brockman said. "If you were to just drop these same bacteria directly into this tank waste, none of them would survive."

 

But on the outside of the tanks, exposed to the same deadly mixture, some bacteria learned to survive.

 

"One of the most interesting findings was a strain of Deinococcus," Fredrickson said. It's a type of bacteria that's been found in Antarctica and on irradiated meat, he said, but never at Hanford before.

 

Brockman said they didn't discover any new species of bug -- based on the standard method for identifying species -- but genetic analysis of the Hanford versions of these bacteria indicate they may have at least found some unique new strains.

 

"These bacteria have learned to shield themselves somehow, to produce proteins or other molecules that protect against the radiation," Brockman said. "Their genes appear to be quite dissimilar (from standard strains of these bacteria)."

 

Though the Richland microbiologists have nothing to do with the tank clean-up effort and didn't launch the study with that problem in mind, their findings could be of some use. Deinococcus, for example, is able to chemically alter one of the contaminants, chromate, in a way that slows its migration through the soil.

 

"It's possible that we may learn how to contain the waste biologically, using these kinds of organisms," Fredrickson said.

 

But for now, Brockman said, the next step will be in figuring out just what kind of microbes they have found, more about their genetics and perhaps identifying some of the novel proteins they produce that allow them to live in such a noxious neighborhood.

 

The Hanford tank study was largely funded by the Department of Energy's Microbial Genome Program -- the microbial version of the Human Genome Project , which also was also launched by the Department of Energy in the 1980s.

 

[ancient_paztriot]

That's a good one; life in radioactive waste. It's just so far beyond our understanding we can only gawk in dismay.

 

The miracles all around us…

 

(Unlimited entities in unlimited situations. Don't get lost in the details).

 

This unusual friend that creates and controls unlimited life… better not treat 'em like people we meet here. That we can be an intimate part of that person's life… we can only gawk in dismay.

[Kulapavana]

bacterial organisms are THE absolute masters of survival. if survival is the essence of evolution, evolution would stop right there /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[ancient_paztriot]

I accept that. Seems self-evident the way you put it.

 

I was trying to conceive in terms of numbers… there being so many of them. When I do this thinking of entities within entities, it's like that infinite expands into the infinite concept of existential matter.

 

I wonder what the average duration of the soul is in the material world.

[Kulapavana]

yes, this is mind blowing stuff... just see how infinitesimal we really are, but Krishna still has personal interest in each and everyone of us... just see His greatness... it is all very humbling.