Chernobyl mushroom test as radiation shield for astronauts

A team of researchers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Stanford University have tested the feasibility of using a type of fungus that is growing in some of the destroyed nuclear reactors at the former site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant to protect astronauts from radiation. They have written an article describing their work and uploaded it to the bioRxiv prepress site.

NASA officials have made clear their desire to send humans to Mars, but before that can happen, many technical challenges will have to be overcome, one of the most serious is to protect astronauts from radiation. Without Earth’s protective atmosphere and magnetic field, humans would not live long in space, on the moon, or on Mars. So scientists have been looking for viable ways to protect astronauts. In this new endeavor, researchers have built on research that showed that some types of fungi can flourish in a highly radioactive location here on Earth, inside reactors destroyed at the Chernobyl site in Ukraine. Tests of various types of fungi have shown that they not only survive in previous reactors, but also thrive. They have the ability to absorb radiation and convert it into energy for their own use. To explore the possibility of using such types of fungi as a shield for humans, the researchers agreed with NASA to send a sample of one of the types of fungi found in Chernobyl, the cladosporium sphaerospermum, to the International Space Station.

Once the mushroom sample reached the ISS, the astronauts monitored the Petri dish created by the researchers. One side of the Petri dish was covered with the mushroom; the other side had no fungus and served as a control. A detector was placed on the back of the Petri dish to measure the incoming radiation. The detector was monitored for 30 days. The researchers found that the side of the Petri dish that was covered with fungi reduced the levels of radiation entering the plate by about 2% compared to the control side. That alone is inadequate as a security shield, but the experiment serves as an indicator of what might be possible. On its own, the fungus is known to grow, meaning that a rocket carrying humans could carry a small amount with them. Once on Mars, the mushroom could be cultivated in a shield structure and allowed to thicken, perhaps offering an almost free layer of protection.

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