Starship Asterisk*

Do bacteria live in nuclear power plant water? Has anyone ever even bothered to check? A quick search shows people have noticed them living on nuclear waste. That's one thing. But how about right inside of an active power plant? There's a lot of water, and it's nice and warm in a lot of places... oh, don't mind the fission. Could you swab some high grade plutonium and find some hardy little beasts living there?

This post brought to you by random musings while trying to get to sleep... I was just thinking about insects and down to single celled life and how the smaller things get, the more variety there must be and the harder it is to catalog them all. Plus at that scale they mutate and probably evolve at a pace we could hardly keep up with even if we tried really hard. We've got people looking for them in the deepest caves, the driest deserts, and in ancient, deep antarctic lakes. Interestingly, some extremophile bacteria can live in an environment as simple as an ultra sugary place. You'd think that'd be a great place for such a thing but no. Anyway, I should go put my head back on my pillow... I'll be dreaming about crazy nuclear powered bacteria...

I read about deinococcus radiodurans. It can survive extreme amount of radiation and thrive on nuclear waste. But apparently this more of a side effect, since such high levels of radioactivity don't occur naturally. The wikipedia article claims that the radioactive resistance is due to d. radiodurans' adaptation to extremely dry environments. If this is true, then it shouldn't be able to live in a water filled nuclear reactor. But who knows what goes on in Chernobyl or Fukushima...