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