Prozac seeping into water supplies
http://news.scotsman.com/health.cfm?id2662004

Research Finds A Compound Associated With Scotchgard More Widespread
In Environment And Wildlife Than First Thought
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/04/010410085108.htm

Sure we can drink our prozac & scotchgard laced water and be happy
and stainproof for the remainder of our lives, but wouldn't it be
better to take all of our waste and run it through a nice high-
temperature solar furnace and distill the water back to purity.

All Habitat waste streams can be remediated with cheap solar energy.

TangoMan

Tango,

I have not looked at the idea properly to see exactly how well it would
work but on first glance it looks like it may just work well. You could
run the water through a solar furnace but why stop with water. I have
seen a proposal to take all toxic or final use material (final use is
something that has been used and recycled and reused to the point where
it is to be disposed of and has no parts that can be recycled or reused
again) and put it into a furnace (solar or in the proposal I saw it was
a hot plasma, I prefer solar, you can get better heat and no
contamination) and heat until everything is disassociated and ionised.
You then use all that free vacuum all around you and throw ( very
carefully so that it is going the right way at the right speed) the
glowing mass into a magnetic field and turn the entire thing into the
worlds largest Mass Spectrometer with big buckets in the right place and
you just collect the now very pure elements in 96 or so little piles and
then you can reuse them by mixing. You just need a good cookbook, want
salt? Take bucket #11 & #17 or need to help the gardens grow? Grab #1 &
#6 & #7 & #8. Now I know that some things just don't mix well that way,
you have to do things in the right way and at the right time but it is a
nice way to turn toxic sludge into ingredients for your super cook-all.

I would like to know what you think, could it work? Meanwhile I'll try
to find the original work, I think it is written, so I'll have search
under the house and look for it.

Darren Brown
Canberra Australia

From: victoriatangoman [mailto:tango_dancer@...]
Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 7:02 PM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [spacesettlers] This is why we need to live in Habitats

Prozac seeping into water supplies
http://news.scotsman.com/health.cfm?id2662004

Research Finds A Compound Associated With Scotchgard More Widespread
In Environment And Wildlife Than First Thought
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/04/010410085108.htm

Sure we can drink our prozac & scotchgard laced water and be happy
and stainproof for the remainder of our lives, but wouldn't it be
better to take all of our waste and run it through a nice high-
temperature solar furnace and distill the water back to purity.

All Habitat waste streams can be remediated with cheap solar energy.

TangoMan

s/S=:HM/A!64331/rand@8128889>

_____

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Darren Brown"

> I would like to know what you think, could it work? Meanwhile I'll
> try to find the original work, I think it is written, so I'll have
> search under the house and look for it.

I like the idea. About 2 years ago I posted the following to UseNet
and it went over like a lead balloon and no one responded:

Just looking for people's opinions on how chemical processing will
change when we have orbital Habitats.

I was just delving into agriculture science in my web surfing and
eventually found my way to farm animals and how in the developed
world, the parts that we don't consume are sent to rendering plants
where everything not used is sent into huge vats and liquified
(anybody see Soylent Greeen?) It came out in this research that many
of the parts are sent to make foods (gummy bears, sausages,
margarine, Rocky Mountain Oysters, gum, mayonaise, marshmellows),
products (piano keys, soaps, cosmetics, shaving cream), industrial
products (rust inhibitors, cellophane, drywall, asphalt), and
pharmaceuticals (insulin, hormones.)

Also in that information was that Pheno-Barbital (which is used to
euthanize the animals) doesn't break down in this process and is
present in minute quantities in all of these products. I put this
information together with three other facts I picked up in the past
few years, 1.) that BSE (Mad Cow Disease) survives processes which
kill other pathogens; 2.) researchers are finding Scotchgard in
Antarctic ice; and 3.) that most recently they found Viagra in an
alarming number of community water supplies (good joke material
here.)

Now I happen to think that the economics of these rendering plants
happens to work because they are part of a complex economy which
demands all sorts of inputs. The Habitats won't have that option and
will have a lot of non-usable wastes, thus what are they to do with
their waste streams? The human waste, the animal waste, the
industrial waste. Of course, some can be recycled. On earth, these
waste streams are biologically broken down where possible, the
sludge then dumped into the biosphere, or incinerated (but not
to atomic level.) Now most of the literature I've read on CELSS has
predicted leakage, but my interpretation was that the leakage would
occur from process inefficicncies, not from not being able to use
the waste streams completely.

All of these troubling issues lead me to lean towards sending all of
our waste streams (no matter how benign we think they are) through a
solar furnace where everything is broken down to atomic level. While
energy won't be free, without the constraint of gravity, the capital
cost to set up a large solar furnace should be minimal. While we'll
still be governed by economic principles, we'll have the option in
orbit to process differently than they do here on earth.

And now I come to the crux of my question. Technically, I'm sure
we'll be able to create this comprehensive waste sterilization
process, and that would be the easy part of the equation. What I'm
unsure of is whether the industries that require these animal
byproducts, and to extend the scenario, other waste products, would
be able to economically work in an "atomic level" supply chain, and
then build their required molecules from there?

If our chemical processes all have to start with the elements, are
we going to be doing a lot of processing just to get back to the
molecular building blocks we sent into the furnace? I'm assuming
that most of these additional processes would require energy inputs
(which would be inexpensive) but I'm curious about how extenisve a
chemical processing infrastructure will have to be?

Even as we are importing items from earth, will we have to
storehouse those elements that have come through the waste process,
until such time as we can build chemical facilities to process them
into economically useful molecules?

Then, as our orbital civilization develops will we have chemical
plants that just make stearic acid (used in car and bike tires to
help hold shape among other uses), fats for our soaps, emulsifiers,
etc., or despite our access to cheap energy, will we duplicate the
processes of earth industries?

From: victoriatangoman [mailto:tango_dancer@hotmail.com]

> All of these troubling issues lead me to lean towards sending all of
> our waste streams (no matter how benign we think they are) through a
> solar furnace where everything is broken down to atomic level.

I don't know if we'd need to take the process quite that far. If we
were to just break the waste streams down to the level of small, simple
molecules (H2O, CO2, NH3, etc.) that would take care of all of the
problems you mention. This is pretty much the strategy suggested by
Marshall Savage, who recommends SuperCritical Combustion chambers for
this purpose.

Regards,

Mike Combs

TangoMan,

Interesting that you, of all people, would posit such an idea with no
cost/benefit analysis, and facts and figures regarding the practicality. The
solar furnace idea might even be usable on Terra Firma for said purposes,
eh? Though I'm kinda fond of being stain resistant... And depression free.
:-)

Also, I remember reading quite some time ago (perhaps 15 yrs+) about using
very large arrays of mirrors to generate steam for turbines, which of course
will be further directed to generate electricity... I thought at least Paul
would have brought those up in you two's prior debates. Whatever happened to
that idea for elec. - I assume it is not practicle, or I'd have heard more
by now.

Val

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Valens Agnitio"
wrote:

> Interesting that you, of all people, would posit such an idea with
> no cost/benefit analysis, and facts and figures regarding the
> practicality. The solar furnace idea might even be usable on Terra
> Firma for said purposes, eh? Though I'm kinda fond of being stain
> resistant... And depression free. :-)

There's nothing more that I'd like in these discussions than to get
hip deep in some cost accounting. However, the sheer complexity and,
to speak in Rumsfeldian terms, the unknown knowns, makes for sheer
seat of your pants estimates.

How much will a tonne of iron cost delivered to L-5? How much, more
or less, will titanium cost, or oxygen, or nitrogen? How does one
calculate the infratructure needed and its costs, the contributions
of supporting industries in the value chain, etc?

We'd need reams of technical and cost information and have to build
a value chain model from ground up, including initial launch from
Earth, and initial build-up on the moon and in orbit. It'd sure be
cool to have that type of detail available though.

So, my WAG is that a solar furnace chamber to superheat waste into
constituent parts will be a simpler technology than typical waste
remediation processes. The reforming chemistry may be more complex,
but who knows.

TangoMan

From: victoriatangoman [mailto:tango_dancer@hotmail.com]

> So, my WAG is that a solar furnace chamber to superheat waste into
> constituent parts will be a simpler technology than typical waste
> remediation processes.

And it could be that the only reason the process is not economically
competitive here on Earth is that here the sun has an annoying habit of
setting every night.

Regards,

Mike Combs

Greetings Mike,

Yes and no, you are very right but there is more to it. You need a big
mirror or lots of smaller ones, so in orbit a large single mirror is
easier but the big one is vacuum, you not only have to heat the stuff to
ionise it but it must be too hot to recombine into things you don't
want. Then to have them go into different places you have to have a
strong magnetic field do the separating for you. You send the atoms out
at speed and then the light atoms curve first and the heavy ones last,
so you use mass to put them into different buckets, so to speak. Of
course you don't want let your mass cool down, heating it each day is a
waste so having the sun go away would be very annoying, also having to
track it is a small bother, you don't want to move all your buckets but
if the sun moves fast you have to track your mirror. That said, the best
place for a solar furnace would be at the same place that SOHO occupies
now.

Darren Brown
Canberra Australia

From: Combs, Mike [mailto:mikecombs@...]
Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2004 11:06 PM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [spacesettlers] Re: This is why we need to live in Habitats

From: victoriatangoman [mailto:tango_dancer@...]

> So, my WAG is that a solar furnace chamber to superheat waste into
> constituent parts will be a simpler technology than typical waste
> remediation processes.

And it could be that the only reason the process is not economically
competitive here on Earth is that here the sun has an annoying habit of
setting every night.

Regards,

Mike Combs

s/S=:HM/A!64330/rand=366431747>

_____