io9.com has a story about a mysterious “white web” that has been recently discovered growing at a South Carolina nuclear reservation. The staff at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site are baffled.They’re puzzled as to what this odd spiderweb-like organism is, and where it came from.

According to a report filed by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, “the growth, which resembles a spider web, has yet to be characterized, but may be biological in nature.”The Augusta Chronicle reported today that the “white, string-like” material was discovered amidst thousands of the spent fuel assemblies, which are submerged in deep nuclear storage pools within SRS’s L Area Complex. (The image up top is of a similar nuclear storage pool at Italy’s Caorso Nuclear Power Plant, which was decommissioned in 1990.) –source: io9  

One train of thought is that this organism could be a new type (undiscovered) of extremophile. You know, those crazy organisms that thrive in extreme living conditions. Like in a boiling-hot geyser, or on the “smoke chimneys” that stand erect from the cold and dark bottom of the ocean’s floors.

Could we be dealing with an unknown species of extremophile? It’s possible — the Savannah River Site’s storage facility (The L Area Complex mentioned above) stores spent nuclear waste in pools that are anywhere from 17-30 feet deep, and while that water is enough to protect the site’s workers from radiation, the growth was reportedly found underwater on the submerged fuel assemblies themselves. –source: io9 

This is kind of unnerving if you really think about it. Here we have radioactive waste being stored in the best way we can think of. Thinking it’s tucked away safely and out of harm’s way, scientists discovery that some life form has now evolved around these radioactive containers.  They have no idea what this is, or where it came from. They can only guess at this point that this might be an organism. This thing could easily mutate into something deadly. An airborne virus maybe?

Too bad the scientists didn’t call me first to ask my opinion on the matter. I would have loved to calmly explain to them that what we’re dealing with here is not a new type of  extremophile or some crystallization process, formed by some chemical process in which <insert chemistry equation here> produces these crystals. No, not at all. I would have gotten out of bed (I assume that they would have called me at some god forsaken hour. You know, like in the movies) and would have said, “Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton…What were dealing with here is the embryonic stages of a mutant’s life. A mop-wielding mutant with superhuman powers, eternally bound to cleaning up the U.S.”

I’d then expect my Purple Heart medal.