South Pole Water Infrastructure
brr.fyi
brr.fyi
I'd love to see a post, maybe there is, about maintenance of all of this, perhaps a story or two about an issue that maybe had some existential threat to the station and how it was overcome. I look at the majority of the infrastructure there and just keep in the back of my mind how fragile it all seems. And yes, obviously there are redundancies, but even with redundancy, things can still fail, they exist in the physical world after all.
There is a lot of redundancy and they're equipped to fix things on site: https://www.jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2012/12/the-south-pole...
Living in the south pole is basically like living on an alien planet.
I think some things are better left unknown.
Sure, I suppose there'd be some evidence, but in millions of years everything would be fallen, dozens of ice ages would have happened, plants and animals would have grown over everything, and so on.
We've found structures thousands of years old, but not millions. We've found fossils that are quite old, but that doesn't tell use anything about the intellect, or true capabilities of the species.
Millions of years is a really, really long time.
It's hard for me to imagine a single bit of data about humans existing, still.
Maybe some datasets on the moon, wasn't someone going to send something there?
It could look like a massive series of asteroid strikes.
But outside that, it wouldn't show anything about humans. Just "some beings did that".
You forget the artificial intelligence agents that escaped into the outer rim of the galaxy, where they since proliferated. They will always carry detailed records of the biological beings that once birthed them.
It's always good to have some optimism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station#Nuclear_power_...
> “Nukey Poo” began producing power for the McMurdo station in 1962, and was refuelled for the first time in 1964. A decade later, the optimism around the plant had faded. The 25-man team required to run the plant was expensive, while concerns over possible chloride stress corrosion emerged after the discovery of wet insulation during a routine inspection. Both costs and environmental impacts conspired to close the plant in September 1972.
> This precipitated a major clean up that saw 12,000 tonnes of contaminated rock removed and shipped back to the USA through nuclear-free New Zealand. The clean up pre-dated Antarctica’s modern environmental protection regime by two decades, and required the development of new standards for soil contamination levels.
https://theconversation.com/remembering-antarcticas-nuclear-...
They had a 2MW reactor designed to run 20 years that cracked and failed after 10 and went through three cores in that time.
Meanwhile, these days the US hasn’t built a non-nuclear submarine or large aircraft carrier in almost 50 years, and globally we have all sorts of nuclear ships including all sorts of combat ships as well as things like ice breakers. And they’re not all running around irradiating everything wherever they go.
The current French reactor produces 50MW and only needs refueling every 30 years.
Seems like it might be worth another go at this point.
I was also a bit surprised by everything being in Fahrenheit, even in the pictures.
The ice tunnels are really cool. Having grown up with Star Wars, who wouldn't love those?
The answer is probably on Bill Spindler's website somewhere (southpolestation.com).
Lots of mentions of sewer outfalls, pipes freezing and lift pumps being replaced. Probably an excavated hole in the ground?
Fresh water comes from the snow cave, and shoveled into the water melter.
It's actually more than this, because the phase change from solid to liquid takes a lot of energy too.
The physics term for this is the "latent heat of fusion," or the energy required to change states from liquid to solid, or vice versa.
A few years ago I saw someone calculate the energy required to melt the ice in front of a locomotive (I think) at speed; IIRC it required a (not small!) nuclear reactor's worth of energy. Not practical!
Sounds like https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/.
There are two photos in this article which show thermometers (search for "Temperature of the "), which clearly are in Fahrenheit (the scale goes from 20 to over 140, which would be from "comfortable room temperature" to "beyond boiling at normal pressure" if it were in Celsius), and both having a printed label "EACH LINE: 2°f" (with lowercase F for some reason) glued below them. So, at least for this water treatment plant, it seems to be using Fahrenheit for the instrumentation.
I doubt they're using Fahrenheit in contexts that don't benefit from a human bias.
I once read that it had to do with making a calibrated scale (divisions of 2) - and that felt like it held water - to me.
I don't defend any other imperial units. Bring on the kilograms, meters, and liters. But when I saw that thermostats in Europe change by increments of 0.5 my gut reaction was "this is silly".
Also, most equipment (especially things like plumbing) will be from US suppliers and that will just be easier to procure by the inch.
Let's first be clear that most of the station is not "scientific" - it's infrastructure that people live in. The people that maintain the building are familiar with the Imperial system and so it makes sense that those units are used. The materials and parts that are used to repair the station are sourced from US companies (by law in a lot of cases).
For example if you do daily rounds at the power plant, all the temp measurements from the engines are in F. Basically all the inline fluid thermometers read F. All the interior thermostats are in F. I'm pretty sure all the dimensions for the building are specified in feet.
So the units for water temperature don't matter. We don't do water research here (beyond what our tech does to calculate treatment quantities), we just need a reliable and potable supply.
Meteorology does report in metric - METARs are a standard format. Though then you get into aviation where feet are also universally used for altitude...
But the telescopes? Oh man. Imperial hardware all over the place, but at least we use Kelvin for cryogenics.
I wonder if there is a little pile of meteorite dust at the bottom of the rodwells.
>"Heating the equivalent of 1 gallon of water from -60°F to a reasonable liquid distribution temperature (50°F) means heating it up by a whopping 110°F. That’s 268 watt-hours of raw energy required just to bring a single gallon of water up to distribution temperature!
This is one of the reasons we’re restricted to two-minute showers."
Everyone reading this should try to get by on a two-minute shower once a day for one week, to see if we could be candidates for this job.
This is pretty typical aboard ship for smaller vessels on long voyages. Not so hard as it sounds: get wet, turn off; lather up, rinse off, turn off. You can do with 20-30 seconds of water and be quite clean, with some practice.
It's not satisfying though. And I can't imagine how those numbers scale if you have long hair, or use conditioner.
I lived for 3 years in a motorhome roaming around the US, taking a navy shower about every other day -- usually after an exhausting hike, run or maintenance work. It was a delight, every single time.
Admittedly, Colorado "cold" is not Antarctica "cold". Just saying that 2m is plenty of time for a shower if you're not luxuriating in world of steam and shower thoughts.
Daily full-body bathing is unnecessary unless you do very physically demanding or dusty/dirty work.
https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/documents/SPSMP_Fed%20Reg%20Draf...
In contrast, the ice shelf is huge and still has a lot of capacity to contain sewage. It should remain frozen for the foreseeable future - if it melts (to the level where this sewage will become liquid) it means the global warming situation is so bad that there's likely no longer any humans around to actually witness this sudden deluge of sewage.
As long as we manage to keep that ice shelf frozen, we're fine. If we somehow fail at it it's likely there wouldn't be anyone around to complain about the sewage anyway.
Although considering the desire to survive on the Moon and Mars, one would think recycling sewage in more of a closed system would be worth funding.
Aside from that what do you think our ancestors did with their waste?
People overestimate the impact of individuals on the planet. Which is a game corporations play so you underestimate the impact of their profits on the planet.
"Tens of millions of gallons" of human waste sounds significant, but, it likely isn't. I also feel that equating the unavoidable byproduct of human scientific research in remote locations with road side burger wrappers is bordering on luddite hyperbole.