Jesse Rogerson

So we just got to, like you said, we got to get through the next phase.

period, however long that is.

Yeah, it's really interesting what happens in these areas.

So as you point out, there's radiation-proof organisms that thrive in these places.

There's funguses, there's different bacterias that can manage.

Like in Chernobyl, for example, they can go there now, years and years and years later, and see various colonies of different microbes and funguses that are thriving in these radiation-dominant environments.

What we would call an extremophile, an organism that lives and thrives in an extreme environment.

They exist...

In variety of places around the planet, no oxygen environments, high radiation environments, high salt environments, the list goes on.

So there are adaptations that have been made by life to manage these places.

And in Fukushima, where we had this reactor meltdown, now we have to go in and we have to clean up.

And the...

Scientists and the engineers, part of this decommissioning of this site, went in and wanted to take a look at what type of life was there.

And they found inside the reactor in these overflow, they're called torus rooms, there's all this water, the seawater that had flooded in.

And that was highly, highly radiative water now.

It's radioactive water.

And they could see in it there was microbes growing in it.

And so they went and they got some, they were able to test it and get a sense of it.

But they found that it was just regular old bacteria, regular old microbes growing that you would just see in any marine environment with no special adaptations whatsoever for a radiation environment.

And that was really confusing.