[HN Gopher] The McMurdo Wastewater Treatment Plant
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The McMurdo Wastewater Treatment Plant
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 107 points
Date : 2022-10-31 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brr.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (brr.fyi)
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Market the processed waste as Antarctic scientist poop
| fertilizer, and I guarantee you could mark up prices by 10x.
| loeg wrote:
| > This squeezes out any remaining water, so the resulting Sludge
| is as light as possible.
|
| > Here's the final solid product, a nutrient-rich soil-like
| material. This is sent back to the United States.
|
| Why send it back?
| waster wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, protection of delicate environment.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Environmental_Prot...
| qwertox wrote:
| Honest question: Can you grow anything out there? I guess you
| could do indoor farming, but maybe it's more than enough
| "compost" they're producing there?
|
| It would be interesting to know if an analysis of it (when in
| the US) could tell some things about how the station is doing.
|
| https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/mcmwebcam.cfm
| eigenhombre wrote:
| Not sure about McMurdo, but South Pole Station has a
| greenhouse, which is an awfully nice place to stick your head
| into now and again if you're doing any amount of time there.
| They grow tomatoes and lettuce, among other things, that
| sometimes make their way into salads for folks on-station.
|
| I've been several times to the Pole for work (years ago), and
| going into the greenhouse and smelling tomato plants after
| days on end of smelling nothing but people, galley food,
| cleaning products, and fuel exhaust, is a pleasant memory.
|
| They do _not_ (or at least did not) use human sewage for
| fertilizer there -- unlike at McMurdo, human waste at Pole
| does not get shipped off station.
| randombits0 wrote:
| Test the polar poop? Preposterous!
| teruakohatu wrote:
| That was very interesting. I did some Googling and my country
| ships back ~5.5 tons of '20% dry sludge' per year back to New
| Zealand from Scott Base.
|
| It looks like McMurdo is drying out the sludge more. My back of
| the envolope calculations based on an old article [1] are that
| McMurdo could be shipping as much as 50-80 tons of dried sludge
| back to the USA each year
|
| [1] https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/frozen-wastes/
| pkaye wrote:
| PBS Terra had an tour of this waste water processing plant along
| with other episodes on how it is to live at the McMurdo station.
| An interesting fact is food doesn't get spoiled there so you can
| keep it around for a long time.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTaVvSe03TQ
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Offtopic, but for how interesting, and likely expensive, that
| series was, I'm surprised by its relatively low view count.
| That video didn't even break a million! Compare that with, oh,
| this random 3Blue1Brown video [1] that has 1.5M views.
|
| Unfortunately, I suspect it is proof that YouTube is not the
| place for high production value documentaries.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/VYQVlVoWoPY
| pkaye wrote:
| I think their algorithms make it hard to discover this stuff.
|
| Another good set of documentaries is the "JPL and the Space
| Age" series by the NASA JPL channel. Also their Von Karman
| lectures.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiv_XWHnOZqFnWQs393R.
| ..
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiv_XWHnOZr-0Wz9ObrM.
| ..
| walrus01 wrote:
| I, for one, am glad that you can't smell things through high
| resolution photographs on the Internet.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > _It feels and smells pleasant, like a slightly humid, earthy
| summer day._
|
| I'm surprised, considering the open wastewater.
| jseutter wrote:
| In my city they use organisms to process wastewater and the
| smell is quite remarkable. There is one section right at the
| beginning that smells like sewage, but the rest of the
| processing plant smells like freshly turned dirt in your
| garden, albeit stronger. Many years ago before they modified
| the process the smell was horrible.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| Years and years ago, I went on a tour of the Paris Sewer
| (museum). It was billed as a cool and interesting thing to
| visit, and while there was a lot of neat stuff to see and
| learn, we rushed through it as fast as possible to get out of
| the smell.
|
| Not sure what we expected.
| shrx wrote:
| It wasn't so bad when I was there, it was quite an
| interesting experience.
| legitster wrote:
| It's crazy how advanced this stuff is.
|
| It's easy to wonder why most of the world struggles with clean
| water until you realize every township in the Western world
| basically has the equivalent of world class manufacturing floor
| run by a handful of elite microbiologists.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Lots of us out in the country are on septic systems and wells.
| superkuh wrote:
| Do the website operators think they're being funny by loading in
| all the photographs upside-down?
| ars wrote:
| That's because you're probably in America, it works fine when
| viewed in Australia.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| It's fun thinking about McMurdo as it relates to what long term
| habitation would be like on some place like the Moon or Mars
| (except this is like easy easy mode).
|
| The waste there would actually be super valuable for growing food
| in.
| nullc wrote:
| Sludge has been used as fertilizer... though this is also why
| there are some huge areas contaminated with PFAs-- they got
| dumped down drains and ended up in sludge sold off as
| fertilizer.
| blamazon wrote:
| In Massachusetts one can purchase Boston-wastewater derived
| fertilizer pellets in bulk from the commonwealth water
| authority:
|
| https://www.mwra.com/03sewer/html/baystate.htm
| reaperducer wrote:
| Milwaukee, too.
|
| You can't purchase Chicago's directly, but it's sold on an
| industrial scale to farmers in the Midwest.
|
| Some zoos sell their untreated animal waste. One brands it
| "Zoo Poo."
| [deleted]
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| PFAs?
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/pfc/index.cf
| m
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per-
| _and_polyfluoroalkyl_subst...
|
| See also: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/pfas-explained and https
| ://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/pfc/index.cfm
|
| tl;dr: Long-lasting, persistent, linked to negative health
| outcomes, under (increasing?) regulatory scrutiny e.g.
| https://www.mass.gov/info-details/per-and-polyfluoroalkyl-
| su...
| jseutter wrote:
| A groups of substances that are useful to give plastics
| certain qualities. They are currently unregulated, and, due
| to their small size, found pretty much everywhere,
| including in our bloodstream.
|
| Several of them are "forever" substances that will take a
| very long time to break down. It's one of the reasons off-
| gridders are recommending not to drink unfiltered
| rainwater, even in climates where it was traditionally
| safe, because PFAS are found in dust. Dust forms the basis
| for raindrops.
|
| Scientists and the general public are starting to become
| concerned about these substances, and at least one
| preliminary study indicates they might interfere in the
| body's ability to react correctly to vaccines. More studies
| are needed, and given the potential for long-term effects,
| the studies might take a long time.
| ciscoriordan wrote:
| If you like this, I recommend "Big Dead Place"
| (https://www.amazon.com/Big-Dead-Place-Menacing-Antarctica/dp...)
| by Nicholas Johnson, a garbageman at McMurdo.
| ddoolin wrote:
| It's not mentioned anywhere in the post, but McMurdo Station is
| in Antarctica.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| Also of note: the whole blog (which is fun!) is one person's
| blog while in Antarctica.
| michaericalribo wrote:
| This gave me fond flashbacks to the book Red Mars by Kim Stanley
| Robinson. There's lots of details about this type of
| infrastructure necessary to support human habitation, to say
| nothing of kickstarting terraforming. Worth a read if you haven't
| already.
| pimlottc wrote:
| This is the coolest domain name I've seen in a long time.
| iamtedd wrote:
| Dammit, I see what you did there.
| lob_it wrote:
| I worked in an envronmental lab as a teenager and am still in awe
| of what percentage of toilet paper was in treated sewage water.
|
| In 2022, the fine cellulose that could be holding onto finer
| particles of..... stuff, pale in comparison to microbeads that
| make it through multiple stages of sewage treatment.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32095965/
|
| The microbeads breakdown even further, so this only means that
| the treated sewage may contain more contaminates (not to mention
| PFAS) than anyone cares to admit.
|
| https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/
|
| New construction in the 21st century at least has the knowledge
| of the additional need for filtering on premises, regardless of
| source (municipal, desalination, rain water, well water, etc).
|
| Very entusiastic blog as well. Author writes with very bright
| eyed and bushy-tailed enthusiasm.
|
| The more you know "bling, bling, bling" :)
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(page generated 2022-10-31 23:00 UTC)