The McMurdo Wastewater Treatment Plant
brr.fyi
brr.fyi
Their bank loses their mind when their bank card is physically used in America and then in NZ 30 minutes later and OP has to clear up how that isn't impossible.
> Being in Antarctica is weird, because you can travel back and forth between the “United States” (McMurdo) and “New Zealand” (Scott Base) in less than 30 minutes.
> Credit card companies have a hard time with this.
https://brr.fyi/posts/credit-card-shenanigans
Edge cases mang!
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.
That said I know it depends on your land conditions and geography.
Source: my local newspaper
Software people have embraced what I like to call the "useless side-grade."
Once there's no major advancement left anymore, people will sell random differences as major advancements, and we'll churn by rewriting everything in the next new framework, forever.
> at last, we can make websites
The real issue is that wastewater treatment is energy intense. It takes a lot of horses to keep the smelly water bubbling, and the heavy sludge circulating where it needs to get to.
Removing emerging contaminants like PFAs is even more energy intense, requiring heavy pumps to push water through filters.
But it's money well spent if you value a clean environment.
Now consider the lakehouse your family enjoys in the summer - where does the wastewater go? Does it go to a septic system? Is it short circuiting straight into the lake?
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" :)
If you raised a family on distilled water and filtered out the contaminents, I'm sure other than high insurance rates in healthcare pools, you'll be fine :)
Edit: How could someone not like this comment and ruin my perfect karma :0 /s? There has been funk in the water for decades. If it has already caused birth defects, undiagnosed ailments or anything, it was already a known fact.
Unfortunately, I suspect it is proof that YouTube is not the place for high production value documentaries.
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...
The waste there would actually be super valuable for growing food in.
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...
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.
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."
I first came across Johnson's work in his Shark Fear: Shark Awareness, which is more of a zine mocking fear mongering post 9/11, and about those deadly deadly sharks.
He committed suicide almost 10 years ago.
> Here’s the final solid product, a nutrient-rich soil-like material. This is sent back to the United States.
Why send it back?
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.
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.
I wintered at Pole, and in that rather fractious winter, I think one of the worst points was when it was decided that the whole crop in the greenhouse needed to be purged. The head of maintenance had broken the Rodwell (water supply), so there was a reasonable desire to reduce water consumption. But, somehow, that morphed in to "shut down the greenhouse", despite it being a closed-loop system... That winter, we had a very comfortable reserve of fuel, and of course South Pole Station sits on a whole lot of ice.
Hi John!
They only do one ship-load per year (deliver all supplies, take all waste back). Overall logistics (including regulatory compliance) might actually make it cheaper to have a single destination, rather than stopping over in NZ to offload some of the simpler to dispose waste. Actual shipping costs are probably in the noise floor after everything else.
It's also possible the program has been partially optimised for pork barrel politics.
More seriously, it is weird. It would seem a good opportunity for us to solve one problem and benefit in some other way as a reciprocal arrangement. For example, US air supply options are likely vastly superior to ours.
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
Not sure what we expected.
Some years later I got around to reading Les Miserables, and it goes off at one point on a long digression about the construction and history of the Paris sewers, which was really interesting.
> It feels and smells pleasant, like a slightly humid, earthy summer day.
I'm surprised, considering the open wastewater.
The smell in the secondary tanks - aeration - is surprisingly inoffensive. The smell for the tertiary tanks can be even a little sweet smelling. In the digestion tanks it's pretty much odorless.
It depends on the input of course. I presume it's mostly food scraps and human waste. Nothing industrial.
https://brr.fyi/media/wastewater-plant/status-dashboard.jpg
I was watching a documentary on cruise ships the other day where I noticed they similarly blurred out a screen in the ship’s wastewater processing room. Why is this information sensitive?
probably true for mcmurdo, but it could also be that any/all real data about the place is banned for outside use. i wouldn't be surprised if you could predict number of people and other details by looking at sewage flows.