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South Pole Water Infrastructure
- anself 2y agoWhere did the wastewater go before the first rodwell was finished?
- joshvm 2y agoI guess something fairly simple - a hole in the ground. Or it gets bagged and put into waste drums (or deposited directly) - this is still what we do at outbuildings where there's no sewage or water infra. The answer is probably on Bill Spindler's website somewhere (southpolestation.com).
- bunabhucan 2y agohttps://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/history/history.html#77 https://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/history/history.html... Lots of mentions of sewer outfalls, pipes freezing and lift pumps being replaced. Probably an excavated hole in the ground?
- cozzyd 2y agoAt Summit Station in Greenland (much smaller than Pole, Pole feels like a luxury resort comparitively), an outfall hole + usually we use the outhouses (which are just made using hot air). Fresh water comes from the snow cave, and shoveled into the water melter.
- namanyayg 2y agoAlways great to see a brr.fyi post on HN. Living in the south pole is basically like living on an alien planet.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tomaskafka 2y agoThat's a great metaphor - and a reminder that settling Mars will be much harder than an antarctic operation.
- perihelions 2y agoOne thing not mentioned: McMurdo desalination (the first one in OP) historically used to be nuclear-powered, but they abandoned that and currently use diesel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station#Nuclear_power_(1962%E2%80%931972) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station#Nuclear_power_...
- consumer451 2y agoDiesel sounds much more practical: > “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-past-with-nukey-poo-99934 https://theconversation.com/remembering-antarcticas-nuclear-...
- nucleardog 2y agoMaybe nuclear, material, and other engineering just wasn’t as advanced in the 50s? 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.
- jsjohnst 2y agoLittle surprised that there aren’t contamination concerns with pumping waste water back into the snow pack. I guess at -60° it doesn’t travel far, but still.
- Metacelsus 2y ago>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! It's actually more than this, because the phase change from solid to liquid takes a lot of energy too.
- jimmyswimmy 2y agoYes, this bothered me too. It's impressive how much energy is required to just melt water much less bring it to temperature. It's 330 kJ/kg, which is 1250 kJ/gallon: 350 Wh. So it costs more energy to defrost one gallon of water than it does to do the rest of the 110F temperature change. 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!
- a1369209993 2y ago> 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. Sounds like https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/.
- brr-fyi 2y agofixed, thanks!
- ta1243 2y agoI was shocked that such a scientific station is using Fahrenheit to measure the temperature of the water
- defrost 2y agoIt's a blog for general US public reading, I'm inclined to think the seriousstuff is all Celsius and SI units and Fahrenheit is used in the social write ups so than regular folk in the US know what the tempretures are.
- ta1243 2y agoIt's the photos that confused me. They weren't even dual-marked in C and F, just in F
- defrost 2y agoFair point, but as SoftTalker observed in a peer comment there are two types of equipment, industrial grade HVAC heating cooling gear sourced from the US for living | working environmental control ( F ) and actual scientific equipment ( not shown in the photos I saw which were all of HVAC type gear and marked in F ).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cesarb 2y ago> I'm inclined to think the serious stuff is all Celsius and SI units and Fahrenheit is used in the social write ups [...] 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.
- langsoul-com 2y agoTo think that beneath the south pole lies a metric shit ton of shit. I think some things are better left unknown.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- b112 2y agoTomorrow, a nuclear war happens. Next, nuclear winter and the slow death of the human race. Antarctica? Sits untouched for millions of years, then aliens land, and find a mysterious additional lake filled with all sorts of microbes.
- dudeinjapan 2y agoGiven the extent of human impact on the planet, these aliens can probably deduce this whodunnit.
- b112 2y agoNot so sure about that. My implied scenario had an implied ice age, and the last one scoured the land clean to bedrock. 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?
- dave4420 2y agoWouldn’t nuclear war leave a distinctive layer in the geological record?
- theideaofcoffee 2y agoIt's always fun seeing these posts, it's a look into such a strange way of living and supporting life. And there's something subtly terrifying about the whole operation too, seemingly teetering on a knife's edge between the ever-forward marching of entropy and all of the energy they need to put in to keep that in check, even more so with it being so cold. How fast it could collapse if, say, there was a generator problem and how diesel fuel is the only thing that's keeping it afloat. 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.
- throwup238 2y agoNit: McMurdo uses diesel since its climate is more forgiving but the South Pole station the author was at uses kerosene-based JP8 jet fuel since it comes with additives for subzero temperatures. They even have their own arctic recipe called AN8. 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-power-plant/ https://www.jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2012/12/the-south-pole...
- m4rtink 2y agoIIRC McMurdo even had a nuclear reactor for a while. :-)
- ironchief 2y agoMore info on the PM-3A reactor http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/
- bizzyb 2y agoMcMurdo and South Pole both use the same fuel, AN8, for pretty much everything.
- immibis 2y agoTL;DR: They mine the Antarctic for ice, creating huge sinkholes, then fill the holes in with raw sewage, a gift for future generations. Environmentally friendly, right!
- icapybara 2y agoDo you have a better idea?
- michael9423 2y agodrying and burning.
- consumer451 2y agoThere are some smart folks making the decisions for the procedures down there. I wonder how that decision process went, to end up with burial. I would love to know the details.
- yencabulator 2y agoThe article briefly mentions this (search for budget), it's pretty much "we don't want to pay for that". https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/documents/SPSMP_Fed%20Reg%20Draft_NSF.pdf https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/documents/SPSMP_Fed%20Reg%20Draf...
- noprocrasted 2y agoThe alternative would be to collect and ship it back which would require tons of energy that will have to be in the form of fossil fuels given current technology. Said fossil fuels have a huge environmental footprint (greenhouse gas emissions and depletion of fossil fuel reserves) that is affecting us now. 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.
- davidw 2y agoThese are the sorts of deep dives into something interesting that I've always enjoyed on HN. 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?
- photochemsyn 2y agoFascinating! >"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.
- jimmyswimmy 2y ago> try to get by on a two-minute shower once a day 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.
- yencabulator 2y agoIf it's not satisfying, you weren't dirty enough. 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.
- verve_rat 2y agoSee also: all the shower scenes in M*A*S*H.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI like what a cold shower does to my brain. It's uncomfortable in the moment but it sort of stays with you all day in a nice way. I used to time them at 5m when I was building the habit but now I gravitate to around 2m. 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.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
- robocat 2y agoA friend working up North said they collected the meteorites after melting the snow they used for water. I wonder if there is a little pile of meteorite dust at the bottom of the rodwells.
- joshvm 2y agoAllegedly (and probably) yes, but it's really hard to tell. In the past, people have dropped magnets down there to pick up things that were dropped - occasionally tools, for example. The magnets come back with filings of metal stuck to them. But it's hard to argue against it just being particles that have worn off piping or other machinery since the water gets recirculated continuously (assuming there are ferrous things in the loop).