In Earth’s highly radioactive hotspots, life can get pretty strange – from fungus that seems to thrive to an explosion of vertebrate diversity in the absence of human interference.
A different story has emerged at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan. There, in the torus room below the reactor, a community of microbes has been quietly nesting in the dark ever since an earthquake flooded the facility with seawater in 2011.
Elsewhere in the world, lifeforms exposed to radiation tend to develop subtle new traits. What makes the Fukushima microbial communities so remarkable, scientists found in 2024, is that they appear to have no special adaptations.
Their story is one of endurance facilitated by a set of traits that allow them to survive in conditions where other organisms might fail.
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