The McMurdo Wastewater Treatment Plant

by Amorymeltzer • 4 years ago

232 89 4 years ago

walrus01• 4 years ago

I, for one, am glad that you can't smell things through high resolution photographs on the Internet.

Years and years ago, I went on a tour of the Paris Sewer (museum). It was billed as a cool and interesting thing to visit, and while there was a lot of neat stuff to see and learn, we rushed through it as fast as possible to get out of the smell.

Not sure what we expected.

shrx• 4 years ago

It wasn't so bad when I was there, it was quite an interesting experience.

elihu• 4 years ago

When I was there in 2000 it definitely had a smell, but it wasn't terrible.

Some years later I got around to reading Les Miserables, and it goes off at one point on a long digression about the construction and history of the Paris sewers, which was really interesting.

AceJohnny23• 4 years ago

From the article:

It feels and smells pleasant, like a slightly humid, earthy summer day.

I'm surprised, considering the open wastewater.

jseutter2• 4 years ago

In my city they use organisms to process wastewater and the smell is quite remarkable. There is one section right at the beginning that smells like sewage, but the rest of the processing plant smells like freshly turned dirt in your garden, albeit stronger. Many years ago before they modified the process the smell was horrible.

emmelaich• 4 years ago

I worked in a wastewater plant for a while.

The smell in the secondary tanks - aeration - is surprisingly inoffensive. The smell for the tertiary tanks can be even a little sweet smelling. In the digestion tanks it's pretty much odorless.

It depends on the input of course. I presume it's mostly food scraps and human waste. Nothing industrial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_liquor_suspended_solids

NegativeLatency• 4 years ago

It's fun thinking about McMurdo as it relates to what long term habitation would be like on some place like the Moon or Mars (except this is like easy easy mode).

The waste there would actually be super valuable for growing food in.

nullc• 4 years ago

Sludge has been used as fertilizer... though this is also why there are some huge areas contaminated with PFAs-- they got dumped down drains and ended up in sludge sold off as fertilizer.

AceJohnny23• 4 years ago

PFAs?

blamazon• 4 years ago

In Massachusetts one can purchase Boston-wastewater derived fertilizer pellets in bulk from the commonwealth water authority:

https://www.mwra.com/03sewer/html/baystate.htm

ddoolin• 4 years ago

It's not mentioned anywhere in the post, but McMurdo Station is in Antarctica.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurdo_Station

Amorymeltzer4• 4 years ago

Also of note: the whole blog (which is fun!) is one person's blog while in Antarctica.

bumby• 4 years ago

If you zoom in on the control system, you can see it says Antarctic Program

lawrenceyan• 4 years ago

Market the processed waste as Antarctic scientist poop fertilizer, and I guarantee you could mark up prices by 10x.

teruakohatu• 4 years ago

That was very interesting. I did some Googling and my country ships back ~5.5 tons of '20% dry sludge' per year back to New Zealand from Scott Base.

It looks like McMurdo is drying out the sludge more. My back of the envolope calculations based on an old article [1] are that McMurdo could be shipping as much as 50-80 tons of dried sludge back to the USA each year

[1] https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/frozen-wastes/

pkaye2• 4 years ago

PBS Terra had an tour of this waste water processing plant along with other episodes on how it is to live at the McMurdo station. An interesting fact is food doesn't get spoiled there so you can keep it around for a long time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTaVvSe03TQ

AceJohnny23• 4 years ago

Offtopic, but for how interesting, and likely expensive, that series was, I'm surprised by its relatively low view count. That video didn't even break a million! Compare that with, oh, this random 3Blue1Brown video [1] that has 1.5M views.

Unfortunately, I suspect it is proof that YouTube is not the place for high production value documentaries.

[1] https://youtu.be/VYQVlVoWoPY

pkaye2• 4 years ago

I think their algorithms make it hard to discover this stuff.

Another good set of documentaries is the "JPL and the Space Age" series by the NASA JPL channel. Also their Von Karman lectures.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiv_XWHnOZqFnWQs393R...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTiv_XWHnOZr-0Wz9ObrM...

lupire• 4 years ago

Maybe more people are about about mathematical paradoxes than Antarctica poop?

thatguy0900• 4 years ago

I wonder what the ad payment rate is to be shown on TV vs YouTube.

Red_Leaves_Flyy2• 4 years ago

If the algorithm promoted videos like that I’d actually use YouTube. I honestly don’t understand how anyone uses YouTube regularly.

michaericalribo• 4 years ago

This gave me fond flashbacks to the book Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. There's lots of details about this type of infrastructure necessary to support human habitation, to say nothing of kickstarting terraforming. Worth a read if you haven't already.

pimlottc• 4 years ago

This is the coolest domain name I’ve seen in a long time.

iamtedd• 4 years ago

Dammit, I see what you did there.

legitster• 4 years ago

It's crazy how advanced this stuff is.

It's easy to wonder why most of the world struggles with clean water until you realize every township in the Western world basically has the equivalent of world class manufacturing floor run by a handful of elite microbiologists.

Scubabear682• 4 years ago

Lots of us out in the country are on septic systems and wells.

xxpor3• 4 years ago

New septic systems are basically mini treatment plants. The amount of equipment it needs are pretty wild. They also (at least in NJ) need twice yearly inspections by professionals.

lostlogin2• 4 years ago

It took me way too long to work out that you weren’t making a jab at Wells and Fargo.

germinalphrase• 4 years ago

I’m pretty sure that the average wastewater treatment plat in the US was built in the 50-60s.

Red_Leaves_Flyy2• 4 years ago

Well managed facilities have seen substantial improvements at regular intervals.

Source: my local newspaper

neurostimulant2• 4 years ago

The core technology is pretty much set in stone already. I wonder when software development finally reached stability like this where there is no major advancement left anymore.

engineer_22• 4 years ago

It's pretty formulaic. Head to Amazon and get a copy of Metcalf & Eddy and start treating wastewater.

The real issue is that wastewater treatment is energy intense. It takes a lot of horses to keep the smelly water bubbling, and the heavy sludge circulating where it needs to get to.

Removing emerging contaminants like PFAs is even more energy intense, requiring heavy pumps to push water through filters.

But it's money well spent if you value a clean environment.

Now consider the lakehouse your family enjoys in the summer - where does the wastewater go? Does it go to a septic system? Is it short circuiting straight into the lake?

ciscoriordan• 4 years ago

If you like this, I recommend "Big Dead Place" (https://www.amazon.com/Big-Dead-Place-Menacing-Antarctica/dp...) by Nicholas Johnson, a garbageman at McMurdo.

thinkingemote• 4 years ago

Very much recommended! It was going to be made into a TV show apparently.

I first came across Johnson's work in his Shark Fear: Shark Awareness, which is more of a zine mocking fear mongering post 9/11, and about those deadly deadly sharks.

He committed suicide almost 10 years ago.

loeg• 4 years ago

This squeezes out any remaining water, so the resulting Sludge is as light as possible.
Here’s the final solid product, a nutrient-rich soil-like material. This is sent back to the United States.

Why send it back?

waster• 4 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, protection of delicate environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Environmental_Prot...

qwertox• 4 years ago

Honest question: Can you grow anything out there? I guess you could do indoor farming, but maybe it's more than enough "compost" they're producing there?

It would be interesting to know if an analysis of it (when in the US) could tell some things about how the station is doing.

https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/mcmwebcam.cfm

randombits0• 4 years ago

Test the polar poop? Preposterous!

eigenhombre2• 4 years ago

Not sure about McMurdo, but South Pole Station has a greenhouse, which is an awfully nice place to stick your head into now and again if you're doing any amount of time there. They grow tomatoes and lettuce, among other things, that sometimes make their way into salads for folks on-station.

I've been several times to the Pole for work (years ago), and going into the greenhouse and smelling tomato plants after days on end of smelling nothing but people, galley food, cleaning products, and fuel exhaust, is a pleasant memory.

They do not (or at least did not) use human sewage for fertilizer there -- unlike at McMurdo, human waste at Pole does not get shipped off station.

Symbiote• 4 years ago

And why to the USA? Can't it be disposed of in New Zealand?

jcranmer• 4 years ago

Island nations tend to be very against the introduction of organic stuff for fear that it might disrupt their fragile ecosystem. And solid residuals from wastewater treatment are very much the kind of organic stuff that is problematic to import.

phire• 4 years ago

I'm guessing the waste removal program isn't optimised for raw shipping costs.

They only do one ship-load per year (deliver all supplies, take all waste back). Overall logistics (including regulatory compliance) might actually make it cheaper to have a single destination, rather than stopping over in NZ to offload some of the simpler to dispose waste. Actual shipping costs are probably in the noise floor after everything else.

It's also possible the program has been partially optimised for pork barrel politics.

lostlogin2• 4 years ago

We have been dealing with American shit for years.

More seriously, it is weird. It would seem a good opportunity for us to solve one problem and benefit in some other way as a reciprocal arrangement. For example, US air supply options are likely vastly superior to ours.

blaser-waffle2• 4 years ago

Treaties require that no waste can be dumped there by anyone.

stephen_g• 4 years ago

They would have way more sludge than they would have any use for (I understand there are a couple of greenhouses at some of the bases, but that's it). So they're not going to just dump it in one of the least polluted places in the world...

superkuh• 4 years ago

Do the website operators think they're being funny by loading in all the photographs upside-down?

ars• 4 years ago

That's because you're probably in America, it works fine when viewed in Australia.

neurostimulant2• 4 years ago

What browser did you use? The images do have 180 degrees exif rotation flag if you check the exif metadata. Maybe your browser doesn't respect the flag?

lob_it2• 4 years ago

I worked in an envronmental lab as a teenager and am still in awe of what percentage of toilet paper was in treated sewage water.

In 2022, the fine cellulose that could be holding onto finer particles of..... stuff, pale in comparison to microbeads that make it through multiple stages of sewage treatment.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32095965/

The microbeads breakdown even further, so this only means that the treated sewage may contain more contaminates (not to mention PFAS) than anyone cares to admit.

https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/

New construction in the 21st century at least has the knowledge of the additional need for filtering on premises, regardless of source (municipal, desalination, rain water, well water, etc).

Very entusiastic blog as well. Author writes with very bright eyed and bushy-tailed enthusiasm.

The more you know "bling, bling, bling" :)

tomcam3• 4 years ago

To me what with things like this and microplastics in the water it’s inevitable that we’ll end up distilling all our water

lob_it2• 4 years ago

No chicken little on this.. Its just an FYI

If you raised a family on distilled water and filtered out the contaminents, I'm sure other than high insurance rates in healthcare pools, you'll be fine :)

Edit: How could someone not like this comment and ruin my perfect karma :0 /s? There has been funk in the water for decades. If it has already caused birth defects, undiagnosed ailments or anything, it was already a known fact.

Scoundreller• 4 years ago

I appreciated their other article: where OP explains how there are two segments of the antarctic research station: an American one, and an NZ one.

Their bank loses their mind when their bank card is physically used in America and then in NZ 30 minutes later and OP has to clear up how that isn't impossible.

Being in Antarctica is weird, because you can travel back and forth between the “United States” (McMurdo) and “New Zealand” (Scott Base) in less than 30 minutes.
Credit card companies have a hard time with this.

https://brr.fyi/posts/credit-card-shenanigans

Edge cases mang!

adrianmonk• 4 years ago

Low-tech solution: get two credit cards, use different cards for different locations. Draw an eagle on one and a kiwi on the other so it's easy to keep them straight.

rendaw• 4 years ago

I'm impressed it's the bank having a hard time and not their customers!

rexarex• 4 years ago

They don’t take credit card at McMurdo, it’s cash only. There are two Wells Fargo ATMs in the main building. Cash that is spent on station gets recycled back into the ATMs. The New Zealand base does take card however.

kalleboo• 4 years ago

So the blogger is lying?

Tronno• 4 years ago

What do the ATMs take?

iudqnolq• 4 years ago

So you're saying that the author of this article forged their credit card receipt and is lying through their teeth? Why would they do that? Is it possible your information is instead outdated?

nextstepguy• 4 years ago

Perfect closed-loop application of crypto coins.

Amorymeltzer4• 4 years ago

I submitted it (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33410693>), mainly for that: a great reminder that there are always edge cases you've never thought of, and more besides.

c_o_n_v_e_x• 4 years ago

The interior of the building that houses the tanks does not appear to be explosion protected. Not a waste water process expert but I thought it's somewhat normal to have hydrogen sulfide and other flammable gases be generated by the bacteria breaking down the sludge.

sbierwagen• 4 years ago

I was wondering about the "Activated Sludge Troubleshooting Chart", which turns out not to be some McMurdo internal documentation, but a commercial product sold as a poster... for US$94.95! https://www.tetratech.com/en/markets/one-water/solutions/was...

MichaelZuo• 4 years ago

Really cool facility. Thanks for posting.

rgovostes• 4 years ago

Interesting that the status dashboard had to be redacted, not only the URL but the data itself:

https://brr.fyi/media/wastewater-plant/status-dashboard.jpg

I was watching a documentary on cruise ships the other day where I noticed they similarly blurred out a screen in the ship’s wastewater processing room. Why is this information sensitive?

blaser-waffle2• 4 years ago

for the ships I'd imagine it's for obfuscating how much they're dumping for environmental regulation reasons. they leak shit and oil everywhere they go, basically.

probably true for mcmurdo, but it could also be that any/all real data about the place is banned for outside use. i wouldn't be surprised if you could predict number of people and other details by looking at sewage flows.

The McMurdo Wastewater Treatment Plant

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