Here in the future, we drink our own pee
in Earth and Space Science, Life Science, Scientific Enterprise, Flow of Matter and Energy, and Human Organism
Woman contemplates a future of urine drinking: As she sips her apple juice.
Courtesy vcalzoneHey, hey, don’t get too excited, Buzzketeers. We’ve been drinking our own pee for a long time. Way back in the past, we drank it for ceremonial purposes. And back in the present we drank it all the time! We drank it to stay alive, we drank it to be on TV (we loved TV back then, didn’t we?), and sometimes we drank it just because we were into that sort of thing.
But here in the future, we’ve really perfected drinking pee. And not just in the Kevin Costner/Waterworld way—that method requires gravity and science fiction, and we’ve figured out how to do it without gravity, with science.
The obvious application here is astronauts. As intriguing as zero gravity and space travel might sound initially, the fact remains that astronauts are trapped in a relatively tiny capsule for great lengths of time with little to occupy their time beyond telling dirty jokes and drinking their own urine. Unfortunately, there are only so many dirty jokes (although mixing and matching punch lines can extend things), and, as wikipedia’s entry on urophagia reminds us, you can only drink your own wiz so many times before problems arise. (Although, as I understand it, the problem with repeatedly drinking pee isn’t that you end up drinking super-pee, but that you get dehydrated, and your body has to reabsorb the toxins from the urine.)
With this new development in urophage tech, however, it looks like astronauts will be able to while away mission hours drinking pee to their hearts’ content.
Now, it should at least be mentioned that the aim of technology here is to turn the pee into something called “water,” and to then drink it. But the principle remains the same. Existing urine-recycling systems rely on gravity, but, again, that’s not an option for astronauts. The new system, soon to be installed on the International Space Station, will take urine, along with water from hand washing, tooth brushing, showering, and space suit sweat, and extract free gas and solid materials from the fluid, before removing remaining contaminants with “a high-temperature chemical reaction.” The result, according to one astronaut, can be “purer than what you drink here on Earth.”
That, ma’am, sounds like a challenge.
Potential efforts to defeat the system through dietary or medical methods aside, the water reclamation process makes a lot of sense. Previously, urine was vented into space, and more water needed to be delivered to the space station. This process should cut about 15,000 pounds from the amount of water and consumables that need to be brought to the station each year, and with the cost of shipping each pint of fresh water into space hovering around $10,000, the savings are nothing to sneeze at. (Considering that “a pint’s a pound the world around,” the system should save something like $150,000,000 a year, if the cost is actually as simple as those figures.)
And no doubt it’ll keep the astronauts happy.
Tags : All over the world there are problems with safe drinking water. From food, health, learning, manufacturing...every aspect of life depends on water. During time I spent in 3rd world nations. What do you think the best way is to solve problem? Why do people still suffer from lack of water when the technology exisits to solve this problem? Is water a right or a priveledge?
From Eurekalert.org
Contact: Jonathan Patz
patz@wisc.edu
608-262-4775
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Waterborne disease risk upped in Great Lakes
MADISON — An anticipated increased incidence of climate-related extreme rainfall events in the Great Lakes region may raise the public health risk for the 40 million people who depend on the lakes for their drinking water, according to a new study.
In a report published today (Oct. 7, 2008) in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, a team of Wisconsin researchers reports that a trend toward extreme weather such as the monsoon-like rainfall events that occurred in many parts of the region this past spring is likely to aggravate the risk for outbreaks of waterborne disease in the Great Lakes region.
"If weather extremes do intensify, as these findings suggest, our health will be at greater risk," according to Jonathan Patz, a University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health professor of population health and an expert on the health effects of climate change.
A primary threat to human health, says Patz, are the extreme precipitation events that overwhelm the combined urban storm water and sewage systems such as those in Milwaukee and Chicago, resulting in millions of gallons of raw sewage being diverted to Lake Michigan. Adding to the risk throughout the region, Patz notes, is the growing concentration of livestock operations where heavy rainfall can wash large amounts of animal waste into the rivers and streams that drain into the Great Lakes, the world's greatest concentration of fresh surface water.
"It's the perfect storm," notes Patz. "Deteriorating urban water infrastructure, intensified livestock operations, and extreme climate change-related weather events may well put water quality, and thereby our health, at risk."
Waterborne diseases caused by pathogenic bacteria, viruses and parasites are among the most common health risks of drinking water. In 1993, Milwaukee experienced an outbreak in city drinking water of the parasite Cryptosporidium that exposed more than 400,000 people and killed more than 50.
Patz, who is also affiliated with UW-Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies' Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, conducted the study with Stephen Vavrus, a climatologist and director of the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research, also part of the Nelson Institute.
Changes in regional weather patterns and, in particular, an increase in the number and intensity of severe rainfall events are predicted to accompany global warming. Climatologists have already cataloged a decades-long trend toward more tempestuous weather, says Vavrus.
"We have seen an uptick in the incidence of severe precipitation events in the last couple of years, but this has been a trend for decades," says Vavrus, noting an increased frequency of both major storms and total precipitation in the late 20th century. "And we are expecting climate (in the Great Lakes region) to change significantly in the future, so we'll very likely see an increase in these extreme precipitation events."
Climate change, scientists know, will prompt extremes of the hydrologic cycle, causing intensified precipitation as well as drought. Using the best available computer climate models, the Wisconsin researchers found that southern Wisconsin is likely to experience a 10 to 40 percent increase in the strength of extremely heavy precipitation events, leading to greater potential for flooding and the waterborne diseases that accompany the high discharge of sewage into Lake Michigan.
Previously, Patz led a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-funded study linking outbreaks of waterborne disease in the U.S. to extreme rainfall. That study, published in 2001, showed that two-thirds of waterborne disease outbreaks between 1948 and 1994 were correlated with heavy rainfall.
The new study, say Patz and Vavrus, points to a need to strengthen pubic health infrastructure and improve aging urban drinking water and sewage systems, and to improve land use planning to reduce the amount of runoff that occurs in urban areas during major precipitation events.
"This is where climate policy, land use policy and public health come together," Patz argues.
###
The new study, which was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was co-authored by Christopher Uejio of UW-Madison's Nelson Institute and Sandra McLellan of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
-- Terry Devitt, (608) 262-8282, trdevitt@wisc.edu
Mussel control: A swarm of zebra mussels have attached themselves to this larger regular mussel. The invasive species has been spreading across the U.S. and have now shown up in three Ramsey County lakes, part of many east-metro area drinking water supplies. But their pressence doesn't impact the drinkability of the water. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)I would have expected this from television news, but this was actually a breaking news story on the Star Tribune website today: zebra mussels have been found in three local lakes that provide water to municipal drinking water systems to east metro cities. A little further into the piece, it does remind us that zebra mussels do not affect the quality of drinking water. The only significant public health issue, I guess, is that the mussels can congregate around and clog up intake pipes for the water systems.
Here’s some other breaking news, from me, about our water supplies: geese poop in them, huge carp (and assorted other fish) die in them, and lots of other natural but nasty things occur there as well. That’s why we have water treatment plants and add chemicals that help purify our water.
What’s distressing is that the spread of zebra mussels is now jumping from the Mississippi River into other local bodies of water where they have no natural predators to control their numbers. And the article barely addresses that issue.
Subscribe
I want to learn about
Science Buzz is supported by the National Science Foundation.Copyright © Science Museum of Minnesota, 2004-2010, except where noted.
Add a new comment