South Pole Water Infrastructure
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Re: South Pole Water Infrastructure
#2Where did the wastewater go before the first rodwell was finished?
Re: South Pole Water Infrastructure
#3Always great to see a brr.fyi post on HN.
Living in the south pole is basically like living on an alien planet.
Re: South Pole Water Infrastructure
#4One 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_...
Re: South Pole Water Infrastructure
#5One 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_...
Diesel 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-...
Re: South Pole Water Infrastructure
#6Little 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.
Re: South Pole Water Infrastructure
#7>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.
Re: South Pole Water Infrastructure
#8Where did the wastewater go before the first rodwell was finished?
I 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).
Re: South Pole Water Infrastructure
#9I was shocked that such a scientific station is using Fahrenheit to measure the temperature of the water
Re: South Pole Water Infrastructure
#10I was shocked that such a scientific station is using Fahrenheit to measure the temperature of the water
It'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.