The Chernobyl Fungus That Eats Radiation

Today I want to talk to you about an interesting fungus, okay? It was found in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.

I'll talk about how it survived and how it could possibly be useful to humans in the future, particularly for space travel.

Hmm.

But first let's talk about what happened at Chernobyl.

I'll just do a brief history because it's good to go over it.

So at 1:23 AM on the 26th of April in 1986, there was a routine safety test being performed at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, and it actually led to the worst nuclear accident in human history.

So the test was designed to determine how long the plant's steam turbines could continue to power the emergency feed water pumps during a power outage.

However, it was a combination of severe reactor design flaws and there was a critical operator error and it created a highly unstable operating condition for, um, reactor four.

So when operators attempted to shut down the reactor by initiate- initiating an emergency scram, which, um, a known defect in the graphite tip control rods caused instantaneous, um, power surges instead.

So within seconds, extreme steam pressure built up inside the system, causing a catastrophic explosion, a tore through the reactor's structure.

This was immediately followed by a second even more powerful explosion that completely destroyed the reactor building.

The immense pressure instantly displaced 1,000 tons of upper biological shield, which was a massive concrete steel lid, and rupturing the fuel channels and exposing the white hot burning graphite core directly to the open atmosphere.

Hmm.

So the result was an intense graphite fire that burned for 10 days, which constantly and continuously released a plume of highly radioactive isotopes, including iodine 131, cesium 137, and strontium 90, and it drifted across the Soviet Union and even over Europe.

And over 300,000 people eventually were evacuated from the south surrounding regions.

Not straight away, let me tell you.

Um, but they were eventually, um, taken away from their towns and, uh, moved somewhere else.

Um, to contain the ongoing release of radiation, the Soviet Union constructed a temporary shelter over the ruined reactor.

It was completed in November 1986, just, uh, six months after the hazardous work.

The structure became known as the sarcophagus, and this was built by a workforce around 600,000 men, uh, they were called liquidators, um, that was consisted of the, um, Soviet military personnel, miners, firemen, and specialized engineers who faced the extreme radiation exposure.

And they poured hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of concrete and they erected thousands of tons of steel shielding.

Um, those poor men got very sick.

A lot of them died.

So-

Hmm