Thursday, August 31, 2006

Nuclear Bugs

New Scientist reports that the cooling towers of nuclear power plants "could be evolutionary hotspots for new respiratory diseases."

It's architecture as a stimulus for Darwinian novelty...

The "warm, wet conditions" inside the towers have been found to host "several previously unknown strains of bacteria, including some that were similar to Legionella pneumophila, the cause of legionnaires' disease." The scientist behind this discovery warns that cooling towers are thus a source of pathogenic "aerosols" – invisible germ-clouds blowing out from their architectural origins to infect the lungs of animals nearby.

This nuclear landscape of concrete hyperboloids belching steam, and virulent microbes, into the sky should therefore "be monitored for emerging pathogens." Super-germs. Radioactive pneumonia. [BLDGBLOG].
I've talked in an earlier post about bioprospecting as an instrument in pharmaceutical discovery and agricultural biotechnology development as well as its connection to biodiversity conservation efforts (especially stemming from the UN Convention on Biological Diversity). I don't believe I mentioned, however, that various disincentives for the pharmaceutical industry arising out of new regulations (via the so-called Bonn Guidelines) has led many pharmaceutical firms to look elsewhere than biodiverse regions for bioprospecting. This includes extreme environments (and what are called "extremophiles" - there's even an organization devoted to them). For instance, Merck has developed drugs from bio-samples prospected from toxic waste dumps near its headquarters in Rahway, New Jersey. So much for conserving pristine, biodiverse environments from this point of view.

Now on to nukes?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, any power plant has its cooling towers. The hyperboloid concrete ones look nicely futuristic and so are used to symbolize nuclear power plants, because the reactor buildings are usually much more prosaic.

But you can find them on coal-fired power plants, too. I'm recalling some on the Ohio River on the approach to the Cincinnati Airport, but there are lots more.

It wouldn't be surprising to find Legionella in any of those cooling towers, however the power plant is fueled.

CKR

James Aach said...

I note the link doesn't mention mention nuclear plants, but rather the cooling towers one finds at factories or oil refineries. Nuclear wouldn't be excluded for this list (which could include large hotels, etc.), but a nuke wouldn't be any worse unless size matters, as nuclear plants tend to have large towers (that's why they often use the hyperbolic kind, which are more efficient for large sizes.) Incidentally, the water going thru these cooling towers is not radioactive in the least - it will be river, lake or ocean water.

If you'd like a look at the real world of nuclear power (which is much different than that portrayed by boosters and opponents alike) see my blog http://RadDecision.blogspot.com for the thriller novel Rad Decision. It's free to readers - who seem to like it judging from their comments on the homepage. Endorsed by Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog.

MT said...

One also needs to factor in that New Scientist is full of shit half the time--or possibly half full of shit all of the time. The longer articles in particular sensationalize stuff well into the realm of distortion and expose you to amazing and even revolutionary ideas that you might not consider worth two minutes of your time, if you were to ask a few experts yourself and had a kettle boiling.

helmut said...

Thanks for the correctives and caveats, folks.