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COMMON SOIL FUNGI COULD LOCK DEPLETED URANIUM
OUT OF HARM'S WAY -- "You can go to just about
any soil,
and you'd find fungi that would lock away
uranium."
For more about depleted uranium, use the VA
Watchdog search engine...click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/sessearch.php?q=depleted+uranium&op=ph
Story here...
http://environment.newscientist.com/a
rticle/dn13829-fungi-lock-depleted-uranium-out-of-harms-way.html
Story below:
-------------------------
Fungi lock depleted uranium out of harm's way
* NewScientist.com news service
* Andy Coghlan
Humble fungi found in most back gardens could help clean up battlefields
contaminated with depleted uranium.
At present, sites can be partial decontaminated by physically collecting
and disposing of fragments from shells. However, radioactive particles and
dust from explosions remain in the soil, preventing full reclamation.
Now, a research team in Scotland has established that common fungi can
grow on and chemically lock away the offending uranium. As their hyphal
filaments sprawled across fragments of depleted uranium, the tubules
gradually became coated in a yellowy mineral.
This, it turned out, locked the uranium into a chemical form inaccessible
to biological organisms, and unlikely to dissolve into surface waters.
At twice the density of lead, depleted uranium is
added to weapons to give them extra force to penetrate targets. But the
complete fallout from exploding missiles is impossible to collect
physically. This means that hazardous radioactive uranium-235 in the
material, which can cause kidney toxicity and has been linked with nerve
damage and lung cancer, can persist in the environment for decades.
Eat your heavy elements
"The fungal-produced minerals are capable of long-term uranium retention,
so this may help prevent uptake of uranium by plants, animals and
microbes," says team leader Geoffrey Gadd of the University of Dundee. "It
might also prevent the spent uranium from leaching out from the soil," he
says.
 Essentially,
the fungi form uranyl phosphate minerals which stabilise the uranium.
"They change its chemistry from being highly chemically unstable and
reactive metallic uranium to one of the most chemically stable forms, thus
preventing uranium migration through the food chain," says Gadd.
Gadd says that any clean-up operation based on the fungi would be very
low-tech. All that would be needed in practice would be to add moisture
and nutrients to soil to help fungi flourish.
"You can go to just about any soil, and you'd find fungi that would lock
away uranium," he says. "You could literally pick them from your own back
garden."
Depleted deleted
But he cautions that the minerals probably couldn't ever be considered
harmless as they still contain uranium, and this could still be toxic if
eaten. Nor have the Dundee team yet worked out a practical way to collect
and dispose of the trapped uranium.
The finding itself was a bonus in research mainly aimed at tracing the
environmental fate of uranium. "Our work is only very preliminary," he
says.
Ultimately, it might be possible to devise practical ways of using the
fungi to decontaminate sites, Gadd says.
Journal reference: Current Biology (vol 18, R375).
-------------------------
posted by Larry
Scott
Founder and Editor
VA Watchdog dot Org
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