The beauty of it is that even as the metals become concentrated in the plants they're removed from the biosphere, so all you have to do is process the plants, extract the metals the same way you would from an ore, and dispose of the remains. A valuable ore may only contain a few percent of the precious metal with the rest being silicon, carbon, or other base elements.
Yes, it's called 'biomining' and there have been several startups working to engineer organisms to do this. eg Universal Biomining working on copper (with bacteria) and a team at University of Washington who took an enzyme from rat's livers and put it in a plant to remove VOC's from the air (successfully!)!
They wouldn't mind having no nickel in the soil, what they do is segregate the nickel into special vacuoles as a protection mechanism against the poisonous metal.
The parent posters point is that it the initial part of the story confusingly paints this as a way to generate "crops" of the metal almost like general farming.
But it's not mentioned for how long those metal bearing crops would potentially grow. If it was only (say) 2 seasons, it doesn't seem worthwhile. Conversely, if it would be (say) 200 years, that's a different story. :)
There was a discussion about such plants and phytomining for a post from a few months ago. It got me more interesting in the topic. Here is the post from 6 months ago for the article and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22457338
Sun Flower plants have been used for decades to remove radiation from soil, and are a very important mitigation element in nuclear disaster cleanup. They grow fast, leech a pretty good amount of radiation from the soil, are incredibly cheap, and require little care.
That's pretty interesting. I remember in the orignal Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie they found sunflowers growing over a toxic spill, but I always thought it was just to show that the spilled chemicals made things grow extra large, but it turns out it was just a lazy attempt at a cleanup.
It needs to be harvested and disposed of (i.e. locked away), but large scale agriculture makes this a solved problem.
I imagine that at least some of the seeds are viable, but pretty much the entire plant (seeds and all) is radioactive and needs to be collected, which for sunflowers means getting to them before they disperse their seeds to the winds.
Several people have talked about plants leaching "radiation out of the soil".
The plants are not separating isotopes. What they actually mean is the plants leach elements than happen to be radioactive. It would be nice if they said what elements.
Mushrooms (and mycelium) can perform similar operations.
Some fungi can accumulate and translocate heavy metal ions and radioactive isotopes out of a system by drawing them into their mycelia network, where they eventually accumulate in the fruiting body (actual mushroom) and can be removed.
These fungi also produce many metabolites which can increase the solubility of certain metals via reduction, methylation, or dealkylation reactions with the metals.
The mycelial network can also be used as a filter to bind to certain heavy metal ions in contaminated water, where they eventually get chelated, adsorbed and entrapped in the fungal fell wall. The company VTT Technical developed a process and was able to recover 80% of the gold produced through the processing of old cell phones and other electronic waste.
What do you do with the mushrooms afterwards? (In the heavy metal case). Presumably you can't eat them, burn them... Do you just pile them up somewhere?
From watching chemistry videos on YouTube, burning them seems like the way to go. I'm guessing you'd burn them in a purpose-made furnace to melt and concentrate the metals, then put the result into safe storage.
The benefit being that this reduces the energy usage required to fully separate the substances? Otherwise you could just apply this process and cut out the fungus entirely.
By "apply this process", you mean to put the soil or water directly in the furnace? The fungi are performing chemical concentration/separation. Depending on how hot you needed to heat the soil to get meaningful separation, you might end up damaging other properties of the soil by heating it so hot.
With water, it would have to be super contaminated for the majority of the dissolved compounds in the water to be heavy metal compounds, so distilling the water would still leave you with some mixture that you'd probably want to chemically separate. At least you wouldn't be causing any damage to the water by boiling it away, but it would be pretty energy-intensive.
This is one of the core parts of world building of Miyazaki's 1980s Nausicaa manga. A world mostly covered by a vast fungus that is accumulating all the 'bad' things scattered about by the last civilization and eventually making inert sands. https://ekostoriesdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/nausica...
Which humans did not understand and wish to destroy as they only saw the forest (which they named the Sea of Corruption) as toxic and threatening the existence of their civilization (both also true).
It's very pointed criticism of our own self-serving approach to environmentalism.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 59.6 ms ] threadBut it's not mentioned for how long those metal bearing crops would potentially grow. If it was only (say) 2 seasons, it doesn't seem worthwhile. Conversely, if it would be (say) 200 years, that's a different story. :)
http://www.rhjunior.com/tales-of-the-questor-0587/
The story was about a racoon farmer trying to leech bauxite from the soil and created a plant to do it.
I am curious.
I imagine that at least some of the seeds are viable, but pretty much the entire plant (seeds and all) is radioactive and needs to be collected, which for sunflowers means getting to them before they disperse their seeds to the winds.
The plants are not separating isotopes. What they actually mean is the plants leach elements than happen to be radioactive. It would be nice if they said what elements.
Some fungi can accumulate and translocate heavy metal ions and radioactive isotopes out of a system by drawing them into their mycelia network, where they eventually accumulate in the fruiting body (actual mushroom) and can be removed.
These fungi also produce many metabolites which can increase the solubility of certain metals via reduction, methylation, or dealkylation reactions with the metals.
The mycelial network can also be used as a filter to bind to certain heavy metal ions in contaminated water, where they eventually get chelated, adsorbed and entrapped in the fungal fell wall. The company VTT Technical developed a process and was able to recover 80% of the gold produced through the processing of old cell phones and other electronic waste.
With water, it would have to be super contaminated for the majority of the dissolved compounds in the water to be heavy metal compounds, so distilling the water would still leave you with some mixture that you'd probably want to chemically separate. At least you wouldn't be causing any damage to the water by boiling it away, but it would be pretty energy-intensive.
Cool channel in general.
It's very pointed criticism of our own self-serving approach to environmentalism.
"Some nickel-loving species like Alyssum murale, native to Italy, can take up to 30,000 micrograms of nickel per 1g dried leaf."
30,000 micrograms, also known as 30 milligrams?