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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the ocean filled with salt and already knows how to biologically degrade fish? I sort of think that you could deposit this at sea somehow, just need to spread it out sufficiently.

I am sure I am overlooking something that would lead to an unintended ecological disaster.

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"just need to spread it out sufficiently"

Use a crop duster type aircraft - what could go wrong?

Edit: Growing up in a fishing village I'm fully aware of the potential for WMD level stench that the fishing industry is capable of generating.

"The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds" - prior failure of intuitively appealing disposal option.

Even in 1970 that could not have made sense to anybody with a brain. They certainly knew enough about explosives to know that the kind of blast required to reliably vaporize an entire whale carcass would be considerably larger than anything they were going to do on a public beach. That whole event was just a couple dudes who thought it would be hilarious and insufficient supervision by adults.

Diluting salty rotting fish sauce in seawater is a lot more defensible. It's not like they'd have to just dump it all in one spot.

Transporting forty-five tons of this stinking liquid far enough offshore won't be cheap.

wrapping it in plastic and burying it in a landfill will also not be cheap

Why not? That's only one big truckload. Oceangoing ships capable of hauling such a small load are easy to come by.

Yes, it needs to be handled with care, but it's essentially the same procedure as with the waste products of desalination water plants. One caveat though - once you start diluting this stuff you have to keep going since the high salt content is the only thing that ensures it's fairly sterile.

The hang up seems to be that the ocean hasn't obtained the proper permits to be a permissable facility to hand that sort of waste.

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