How much pee in a pool would kill you? | Hacker News Reader

How much pee in a pool would kill you?

arstechnica.com

48 pointsbmoresbest5513 comments

If you just want to satisfy your curiosity without wading through the article:

  In the end, we need a pool that is two parts water to one part chlorine and would probably burn the
  eyeballs out of your sockets and make your skin peel away from your bones (this calls for a pool boy who 
  can only be criminally sadistic). If you and three million other people could get at this pool and unload
  your pee into it before your bodies melted, before the crowd crushed you to death, and before you drowned
  from the massive tidal wave of pee... yes, you could feasibly die of cyanogen chloride poisoning
  originating from chlorinated water and pee.

This article is about Uric acid + Chlorine producing Cyanogen chloride (NCCl), but a bigger concern in practice is Urea + Chlorine producing Trichloramine (NCl3). It has been suggested[1] that this reaction is responsible for the rise in asthma cases.

Also, it is responsible for some ignoble controversy around the new public bathhouse in my old home town. Apparently there was a perfect storm, in that the building both has a poorly designed ventilation system, _and_ inconveniently located restrooms which tempt people to...

No deaths so far, but several people complained about the bathhouse air making their asthma flare up, and when measured the concentration was above the health and safety limits [2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_chlorine_hypothesis [2]http://www.sydsvenskan.se/lund/kansliga-personer-varnas-for-...

This is actually pretty cool. I would love to see examples like this used in high school gen-chem courses. It would probably help to keep the students' interest in what could be either an incredibly dull or exciting subject, chemistry.

This is fairly reminiscent of xkcd's What If blog post series: https://what-if.xkcd.com/

If you enjoyed reading this article, xkcd's Randall Munroe publishes "what if" analyses on a sporadic basis at http://whatif.xkcd.com/.

It's not sporadic, it's updated every Tuesday. (But yeah, seconded.)

Also, he is preparing to publish a 'What If?' book [1]. Always a good idea to support your favorite authors.

[1] http://blog.xkcd.com/2014/03/12/what-if-i-wrote-a-book/

Scale that down, and you have 2/3 liter of water, 1/3 liter of chlorine, and one person peeing to get the same deadly concentration.

I can't base it on any even remotely scientific argument, but to me, something seems wrong with that conclusion; it just seems weird that it would be that easy to get a poisonous concentration. I guess it is that the deadly concentration is of the gas in air, across multiple inhalations. If so, one needs much more of the gas.

But as I said I simply don't know. Can anybody else?

The chlorine water solution itself would be unpleasant to deal with. Bleach is more like 10 parts water, and that is still worth handling carefully (at least, I think so).

If you were to urinate straight into off the shelf bleach, bad things would happen. For maximum drama, let the urine age for a few days to build up ammonia levels.

http://www.chemaxx.com/explosion16b.htm

If you enjoyed reading this article, you might find The Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com/) interesting as well.

One of my favorites: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/113/the-story-of-sc...

About an inch if you're face down in it.

The ocean is mostly fish pee.

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