Historical research guide · 0636 · 2013

Transmutation of stable isotopes and deactivation of radioactive waste in growing biological systems

Vladimir I. Vysotskii · Alla A. Kornilova

In one minute

Vladimir Vysotskii in Kyiv and Alla Kornilova in Moscow report what happens when you grow microorganisms in water containing something you would rather not have. Their subject is transmutation — one element becoming another — inside living cultures, and this is the paper where they take it out of the laboratory-curiosity register and aim it at a working problem: reactor waste. Two results carry it. The first is that mixed communities of microorganisms are about twenty times better at transmuting stable isotopes than a single pure culture grown alone, which says the effect belongs to the association rather than to any one organism. The second is the deactivation run. A closed flask of active water holding caesium-137 and no microorganisms decayed exactly on schedule, at the usual thirty-year lifetime. The same water with an optimal microbial association and a calcium salt present decayed with a lifetime of about 310 days — a rate thirty-five times faster. The authors name Chernobyl and Fukushima as where they think this goes.

Connection

Chapter 12 is about nuclear reactions that happen inside ordinary matter at ordinary temperatures rather than in a plasma, and this is the branch of that claim with the most useful consequence attached: if a growing culture can shorten a thirty-year isotope to under a year, waste water is a chemistry problem rather than a storage problem. It is also the cleanest test the field offers, because the quantity measured is the decay of a known radioactive nucleus against its own textbook clock.

From the source

The paper reports qualifying examinations of the transmutation of both stable and radioactive isotopes in growing microbiological cultures — the whole point of the work being that the process is examined in a living, growing system rather than a physical apparatus.Abstract, opening sentence; Highlight 1
Transmutation of stable isotopes during the growth of microbiological cultures, at optimal conditions in microbiological associations, is twenty times more effective than the same process in one-line pure cultures. The association, not the individual organism, is what does the work.Abstract, second sentence; Highlight 2
In the control experiment — a flask of active water with no microbiological association in it — the usual law of nuclear decay applied and the lifetime of the caesium-137 isotope was about thirty years, which is the textbook value. The control is what makes the comparison readable.Abstract, the control-experiment sentence
The most rapidly increasing decay rate observed had a lifetime of about 310 days — an increase in rate, and a decrease in lifetime, by a factor of thirty-five. It occurred in a closed flask of active water containing caesium-137 solution together with an optimal microbiological association and a calcium salt. The authors identify the product as the stable isotope barium-138.Abstract, closing sentence; Highlights 3 and 4
The authors propose microbiological deactivation as a method for treating the Chernobyl and Fukushima areas, and this is where the result stops being a laboratory measurement and becomes a proposal: what would settle it is an independent laboratory running the same closed-flask comparison on the same isotope.Highlight 5
The programme did not stop in 2013. In a later conference report the same authors state that optimisation of the biotechnology brought the deactivation time for caesium-137 down from the 310 days of these initial experiments to fourteen days, write the reaction as caesium-137 plus a proton giving barium-138, and attribute the mechanism to coherent correlated states of interacting particles formed by the dynamics of dividing cells rather than to any external drive.Authors’ later conference abstract, Biological transmutation of stable and radioactive isotopes in growing biological systems, second and penultimate paragraphs

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anucene.2013.02.008

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

WHAT THIS IS. Annals of Nuclear Energy, volume 62, December 2013, pages 626 to 633, by Vladimir I. Vysotskii of Kiev National Shevchenko University and Alla A. Kornilova of Moscow Lomonosov State University. The article is closed at Elsevier, whose site refuses automated requests, and Crossref carries no abstract for the record, so no text is reproduced here. SOURCES FOR THE CLAIMS. Claims one to five are read from the published abstract and the article’s five Highlights as indexed by the International Atomic Energy Agency in the ETDEWEB record at https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/biblio/22358255, which reproduces both in full. Claim six is read from the authors’ own later conference abstract, ‘Biological transmutation of stable and radioactive isotopes in growing biological systems and its possible applications in medicine and ecology’, free to read at https://www.fnob.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Vysotskii.pdf, and its locator names that document rather than this paper. RELATED PAGE. Jean-Paul Biberian’s two-century review of the biological transmutation record, which reads this group’s results as the strongest evidence in the field and also sets out the thirteen experiments that found nothing, is on this site at /library/stm-38077a857a.

How to cite it

Vladimir I. Vysotskii, Alla A. Kornilova (2013) Transmutation of stable isotopes and deactivation of radioactive waste in growing biological systems doi:10.1016/j.anucene.2013.02.008

Where it sits in the curriculum

Lattice confinement fusion