From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Sat Jan 06 2001 - 13:48:50 MST
How much is known about D. radiodurans's tricks for survival at high
rads? I think I'll go look.
Will report back. Then we can talk to Doug Skrecky about a D.
melanogaster "knock-in" program. :)
Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de wrote:
>
> "S.J. Van Sickle" wrote:
>
> > Large scale radiological weapons can do a pretty good job. They are
>
> There's a lot of Co-60 necessary to make the ground uninhabitable
> for Deinococcus radiodurans. I haven't seen the studies, but intuitively
> I would doubt it. Consider how many kg of pure isotopes were blown into
> the air by Chernobyl, and it's impact was hardly felt. Most of it went
> down within a 30 km radius of the reactor.
>
> Stratospheric blasts would be more evenly distributed, but this would
> reduce the local exposure. How many kg of pure isotopes does a fusion
> nuke produce?
>
> > possible, even relatively cheap compared to what was spent on
> > "conventional" nuclear weapons, but were never built. Why? Because there
> > is no *military* reason to sterilize the planet.
>
> Similiar things said Dr. Strangelove.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:04:35 MST