• @AgreeableLandscape
    link
    3
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Interesting development. Though, I’d be interested in what the procedure after uptake by these plants would be. You can’t compost them because then the heavy metals would go right back, you can’t leave them there because then you’ll get heavy metal transfer up the food chain, burning them could potentially release them into the air, and even if you bury them like nuclear waste, organic materials tend to move into ground water pretty easily (probably way easier than nuclear waste, which I imagine aren’t very water soluble since nuclear reactors are submerged in water), plus if they sit in a place with no oxygen, they’ll produce methane. And heavy metals never get metabolized to become anything not toxic, and if the plants absorbing them means turning the heavy metals into organo-metalic compounds, those are almost always much more dangerous to life than just inorganic metals or salts.

    Heavy metals are a Pandora’s Box. The instant you open it, you’ve released the monsters and it becomes next to impossible to get them contained again.

    Maybe the best thing to do would be to chemically extract the metals, turn them into inorganic and non-water-soluble salts (essentially back into ore), and then bury them? But that would obviously be insanely expensive and also energy intensive.

    • @Godless_Nematode
      link
      22 years ago

      The million dollar, unanswered question is what happens to the harvested plants?

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
      link
      22 years ago

      Yeah, ideally we shouldn’t be polluting our environment with heavy metals, but this definitely could be a nice approach for detoxifying the environment going forward. And on a bit of a tangent, it’s insane that we continue to destroy rainforests and all the biodiversity they contain. So many amazing things are now forever lost to the world because capitalists wanted to make stuff like palm oil.