Why not organic kitty litter?
Got to have something to do with all the newspapers and Weetabix byproducts...
Actually, come to think of byproducts in food production... what DO they do with all the caffeine from decaffeinated coffee?
Nuclear waste spill: How a pro-organic push sparked $240m blunder
There's a rather dry but absolutely fascinating document out from the US Department of Energy, which you can download in all its couple of hundred page glory here [PDF]. It's about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad in New Mexico. This is where the Yanks send off all those barrels of radioactive nasties to …
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 10:23 GMT fajensen
Re: Why not organic kitty litter?
Organic kitty litter will rot and become soil again eventually so one can dump the contents of the cat-tray in the compost or bury it; The in-organic stuff is basically clay which is dried and "popped" like pop-corn.
This stuff just sits there, one cannot dump it, it has to go into the bin.
There is I.O.W. no requirement for cat-shit to last forever - we want it to be GONE, hence the organic cat-litter is the better product.
If one is covering cat litter with radioactive waste, then, probably, the ecological aspects are less relevant.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 10:55 GMT PNGuinn
Re: Why not organic kitty litter?
Not sure I'd recommend flushing that down the bog. In fact definitely NOT.
Lots of marketing droids say their stuff is flushable. It helps sales to idiots ('most everyone out there) you know.
"Got a blockage - your'e flushing it wrong." - Also works for fruity firms apparently.
Talk to any sewer worker about blockages and what causes them. You have a system - usually 4 inch pipes - designed to cope with s**t + some small pieces of paper designed break up easily. You feed it a s**tload of lawncrapper s**t PLUS a tray of soggy, sticky (to a sewer) gubbins plus a mere 6 litres of water. Hmmm....
Top tip - don't mention wet wipes, sanitary towels, food waste etc to a sewer worker if you don't want a colourful reply.
And don't get me started on those so called disinfectant blocks that people clip onto the rim of the pan - presumabably to give little boys something to aim at. Accidently tip one of them in and flush and you have a blockage complete with anchor going down. Very effective (and expensive).
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 12:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Why not organic kitty litter?
"It helps sales to idiots ('most everyone out there) you know."
High opinion of your self I see. Do you really think most people are idiots. What is the threshold above which one becomes a person deserving respect in your eyes? I ask as it would give me something to aim for - rather like those disinfectant blocks you mentioned. Oh sorry, did I get you started? Do have a lie down.
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 00:04 GMT Jan 0
Re: Why not organic kitty litter?
JetSetJim typed > Organic cat litter I get can be flushed down the loo
Can some cat* lover explain to us all why they don't fit pet karzies in their houses? Why not cut out the middleman^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcat litter and go directly into the sewerage?
*also apples to dog lovers. Why interpose a pavement beween the dog's arse and the drains?
Flame, for obvious reasons.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 11:42 GMT Otto is a bear.
Re: Why not organic kitty litter?
Oh, I don't know responsible dog owners do and most cats prefer to bury their output in your petunias as a surprise for you later.
Anyway soil based kitty litter, will break down in landfill, and helps landfill sites to generate gas for the grid. It just becomes biologically richer in the process, although perhaps not in the way the soil cycle usually works. Ask any geologist.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 14:20 GMT Dan Paul
Re: Why not organic kitty litter?
You don't want to use organic kitty litter if the only use for it on site is as a collection agent for spills in a chemical lab.
Regular clay based cat litter is somewhat basic and would tend to neutralize and absorb weak acids and other chemicals or spills.
Organic litter would react with the chemicals and likely offgas. Or decompose and and offgas.
One would hope that animal testing labs would not use organic litter if they were doing anything radioactive. The animal excrement would be fairly radioactive as it tends to concentrate the testing substances.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 23:55 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: billions of tons of lard
So basically I just read a two-page rant by Worstall about "hippies" (which appears to mean anyone who buys organic to Worstall) and how they are in some vague but implied way responsible for someone in the US not knowing how to do their job -- all because Worstall doesn't know that organic cat litter actually has a convenient purpose to it and wants to blame a nuclear accident on a "pro-organic push".
I really should learn to check the author before reading in future.
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 15:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: billions of tons of lard
just because some marketing w*nker put's organic on the packet, does not mean it's better either at the job it's supposed to do, or for the enviroment!
Damn eco-nutters, will happily fuck everything up through being stupid, as they believe they are saving the fucking planet. (planets do not need saving, it's a huge ball of fucking elements orbiting a star!)
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 16:26 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: billions of tons of lard
>>"just because some marketing w*nker put's organic on the packet, does not mean it's better either at the job it's supposed to do, or for the enviroment!"
Organic cat litter is organic material such as pine chips and decomposes. Inorganic cat litter is typically clay and does not. Worstall basically went on wild goose chase because he apparently doesn't own a cat and can't use Wikipedia. Or even ask a friend who does own a cat!
And you have taken up his ignorance and run with it.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 11:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Fast Integral Reactor.
'Stop burying nuclear material'
I'm quite suprised no-one has thought of storing nuclear waste on the moon. Let's hope that such a strategy wouldn't cause the accumulated waste to eventually reach critical mass and cause a massive thermonuclear explosion, which would act like a giant rocket, pinging the moon out into space. If this were to ever happen, I'm sure the inhabitants of the first moonbase (let's call it 'alpha' for the sake of argument) would have approximately 2 seasons worth of adventures, while they ride the moon through outer space.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 11:32 GMT Otto is a bear.
Re: Fast Integral Reactor.
It could be man's way to the starts, after all, it must have been going at one hell of a speed for them to have all those adventures. I wonder how much energy you would need, and for that matter, an older and wiser me wonders why the inhabitants didn't end up as amusing smears on the floor when the moon accelerated.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 13:54 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Fast Integral Reactor. @otto
As a story-teller and realiser on the small screen, Gerry Anderson was pretty good. As a scientist, not so hot.
There were plenty of plot holes. Like why was the moon able to avoid being captured by the stars/planets it passed close to. And where did they get their energy, especially in a form suitable for the Eagles. And how about the seemingly unending supply of Eagles when they were destroyed. And how come they could cross interstellar space so fast, but still slow enough to allow planetary exploration missions. And why the moon was not torn apart by tidal forces when it passed within the Roche limit to planets and even the black hole it went through. And how come so many Earth spaceships found the moon. And how they managed to get enough Sinclair Pocket TVs to make their communicators 10 years after most of them had broken.
And, to cap it all, why was there so little furniture in the Control Centre that everybody had to stand around, punching buttons on the walls!
Still, the first season was a good romp, although I thought widening the plot in the second season to include metamorpths and the like was going a bit too far.
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 08:50 GMT Peter Gathercole
@MrDamage
And the first, as you pointed out, is Science.
There was lots of bad science in all of the Gerry Anderson works, and they were all set in the near future, so they could not really play the radical new technology card.
Dose it detract from the tremendous stories, strong characters (even though most were plastic or plasticine), or the fantastic achievements of AP Films and Century 21 Productions in the field of special effects? No it doesn't.
I am a huge fan of all of Gerry Anderson's work (well, Dick Spanner was a bit strange, and Terrahawks was below par IMHO), but that never stopped me cringing sometimes at the "Science", even when I was a child (My formative years were during the original runs of the "classics'" in the 1960's and 70's; I am of the Century 21 Productions generation, and am almost exactly the same age as Joe 90 would be).
(P.S. Answer me this. Why do Thunderbird 1 and 2 come to a dead-stop in the air, and only fire their landing jets when they want to decend?)
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 16:03 GMT streaky
Re: Fast Integral Reactor.
Moon/Sun. Never sure if people are seriously when they suggest stuff like this but on the offchance I always like to point out what happens when rockets go bang in the atmosphere. Doubt many Floridians would like highly reactive waste raining doing on their houses and half the Atlantic coast.
Also deep borehole disposal is the only way forwards.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 23:13 GMT Mark 85
Re: Fast Integral Reactor.
Moon/Sun. Never sure if people are seriously when they suggest stuff like this but on the offchance I always like to point out what happens when rockets go bang in the atmosphere. Doubt many Floridians would like highly reactive waste raining doing on their houses and half the Atlantic coast.
The real reason for not doing it is economics. The spent waste is dense and the shielding just as bad. At the price per pound to launch, it's just too expensive.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 12:58 GMT John Sager
Re: Fast Integral Reactor.
@Symon: The reason it's buried is political, not technical. If the Eco-loons & disarmers (including Monbiot AFAIR) didn't complain so much about reprocessing, then it would get recycled into new nuclear reactors. But there aren't any of those due to said Eco-loons. You still need a repository as the recycling isn't 100% efficient and there is always low level radioactive stuff that it isn't practical or economic to make safe. Even the high-level activity stuff out of the reprocessing plant can be cycled through certain designs of reactor to make it safer.
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Friday 3rd April 2015 08:58 GMT Hans 1
Re: Fast Integral Reactor.
>You still need a repository as the recycling isn't 100% efficient and there is always low level radioactive stuff that it isn't practical or economic to make safe.
You still need a repository as the recycling leaves 99% of waste, most of which is low level radioactive stuff that it isn't practical or economic to make safe.
There, fixed it.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 10:46 GMT frank ly
Three points
1: "And organic stuff is made from grains: possibly the chaff from wheat or corn."
Was the wheat/corn grown on a certified organic farm?
2: The idea of mixing oxidising chemicals with carbohydrates is a good one, if you want a strong exothermic reaction.
3: For something as important as this, they didn't have a proper specification of materials? It just said "mix it with some cat-litter." ?
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 10:48 GMT boba1l0s2k9
Subsidies
...are a good bet. Same reason the petrol has 10% ethanol even after it was demonstrated that the total process required to get the ethanol into the petrol resulted in more emissions than just using straight petrol. Hippies are another reasonable bet -- anything labeled organic sounds better to a hippy.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 22:01 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Subsidies
Organic stuff needs to e transported faster as it spoils faster, requiring more fossil fuels to be burned.
Actually, the main burning happens in the car driven by punters to the big food logistic centers known as "malls" and back to their conapts.
Additionally, experiments in my fridge consistently show that standard pepperonis and chilis decay *way* before organic pepperonis and chilis and the organic ones look better to boot. I don't know why, but there you go.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 10:53 GMT PyLETS
Found in a piggery near me
Rumour has it that the escaping nuclear waste got mixed up with some genetically modified maize which was reused in commercial pig feed, and the pigkeeper is now breeding a new strain of mutant pigs which are sprouting wings and getting ready for take off. On somewhat better authority, Jeremy Clarkson is considering reducing his carbon footprint.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 14:32 GMT Dan Paul
It's the same thing (Diesel vs Fuel Oil)
There are only different grades that are either lighter or darker colored oil. Also same as kerosene or JP4.
If mixed in the right proportions ANFO (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) requires another explosive like a blasting cap to set it off. They mine with it all the time, its VERY stable.
You could try to light it with a match and it will just burn like C4. Ask Lewis, he will back that up.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 14:49 GMT Dan Paul
Something entirely different
Now you get into something that increases the mechanical or electrical shock sensitivity by adding metal powders to an oxidizer.
The comment about nitrobezene would also make it more hazardous. No need to do that. ANFO moves mountains all by itself.
Ammonium Nitrate is a strong oxidizer and the carbon in fuel oil is a great fuel. Add some 8th grade chemistry equations and you can figure out how that or other chemical work with Ammonium Nitrate.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 21:19 GMT Chris G
Re: Something entirely different
Wood flour would help; many years ago I worked on an old Edwardian house in Islington, doing a restoration from bedsits back to a single house.
Part of the job was to sand all the painted floors and then treat them with Danish oil.
A 4 story house has a lot of floor area and that produced a lot of wood flour mixed with the paint dust from the paint that was on the floors; my mate decide to get rid of the large black bag of wood flour from the drum sander by chucking it onto the bonfire we had going in the back garden, as he threw the bag on to the fire it split and the ensuing cloud of dust literally went up in a mushroom cloud. My mate? No eyebrows, moustache, half his hair gone, the hair on his arms and a singed teeshirt. Me? looking out of the upstairs window laughing fit to bust.
I know! I'm a bastard !
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 12:53 GMT Nigel 11
Ammonium Nitrate _is_ fertiliser. You make a better bomb if you add some kerosene. At least, so I've heard. ANFO.
AFAIK this is the only time a terrorist organisation (anyone know which one? ) contributed something useful to the body of knowledge used by civilisation.
Mining used to employ high explosive (Dynamite, TNT, etc.) which is expensive and non-trivial to store and in some cases toxic to handle. Open-cast mining has now adopted ANFO - cheaper, non-toxic, and manufactured down the hole where you want the explosion. Nitrate fertilizer first, then add fuel oil, then top with a detonator.
BTW Ammonium Nitrate is also an explosive on its own. You do have to hit it very hard before it goes bang, but if you manage to do so, watch out. One of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever was in the Netherlands when the roof of a warehouse full of Ammonium Nitrate leaked, and the entire contents set solid. Someone had the bad idea of loosening it up with a few sticks of dynamite. He did not survive the several-kiloton non-nuclear explosion which resulted.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 13:25 GMT x 7
"There was an entire ship full of it that went off once as well I think."
The Grandcamp, in dock at Texas City, 1947
2600 tonnes of Ammonium nitrate, plus other chemicals exploded
500+ dead
Many other serious explosions as well -see the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate_disasters
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 11:57 GMT Tom Maddox
Organic cat litter
The rationale I was given for using "organic" (i.e., grain- or wood-based) cat litter is that the desiccants in cat latter are bad for both your cat and you, especially if you live in a smaller residence. This may just be marketing guff, however. On the other hand, it is demonstrably true that the higher-end cat litters last longer and don't get tracked around the house in the same way.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 14:36 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Organic cat litter
" the desiccants in cat latter are bad for both your cat and you"
This is true of some varieties of diatomaceous earth - make sure you buy _un_calcinated stuff - aka food grade - as the dust from heat-treated version can damage mucous membranes (silicosis)
For the usual Fuller's Earth litter (attapulgite clay) it's mainly down to dust hazards (silicosis), but it's generally so coarse that's not an issue.
In both cases: You'd have to breath a _lot_ of the dust for it to be an issue.
For clumping litters: It may be a problem if kitty eats it - in which case you should use something else.
By the way, it's a good idea to keep a big bag of the clay-based stuff in the boot of your car if you drive in snow or encounter muddy conditions. It's cheaper than a bag of pea-gravel, environmentally benign and tossing a bunch of it under the tyres often gives enough traction to get unstuck if you have wheelspin issues whilst stationary.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 16:08 GMT streaky
Re: Organic cat litter
that the desiccants in cat latter are bad for both your cat and you
That and it all contains silicon dioxide which as well as being carcinogenic (i.e. it causes cancer) it's generally pretty nasty for your lungs (silicosis). Might not be too bad for crazy cat lady but it's potentially pretty nasty for the people who have to work with it (occupationally, as in, make it), I did once have to work with it in it's pure form and you have to take a lot of precautions.
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Monday 6th April 2015 17:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Organic cat litter
Yes it's sand. But the dust, if inhaled in sufficient quantity or over a sufficiently long time (think sandblasting or maybe some kinds of pottery work or maybe even working in a cat litter factory before the issue was understood properly...) does cause silicosis and the consensus is it also increases the risk of some cancers.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 13:33 GMT Arkhanist
I use the mineral-based litter myself, but a bag full of that stuff is seriously heavy - given it's basically ground up clay, not surprising. Plus there's a fair amount of dust when you have to empty and clean the whole tray (the clumps are still quite crumbly and leave contaminated bits behind, as well as bits that weld themselves to the tray when they absorb uhh, liquid). So if you're an old lady with a bad back and/or asthma, the organic stuff is a bit easier to deal with. I'm pretty sure old ladies with a lot of cats is a large enough market segment to be worth targeting, aside from the hippies.
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 14:41 GMT Alan Brown
Kitty Litter
Seeing as this has degenerated into cats: Check out "Citi Kitty". Less mess, less fuss.
One of my moggies started using the monkey toilet unprompted after she decided the feline one wasn't being cleaned often enough....
There are a bunch of selfcleaning litterbowls available, including a couple which are plumbed in. I have no idea how well they'd work for "nuclear waste", or whether the results could be fed to a LFTR
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 07:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Kitty Litter
One of my moggies started using the monkey toilet
There are risks associated with that. A colleague once followed the sound of plaintive meows to find the cat spreadeagled in the toilet bowl. With 4 paws down it was stable, but as soon as it lifted one to try and get out, the others started sliding towards the water...
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Wednesday 1st April 2015 16:30 GMT Graham Marsden
Waste of Time on a Wednesday...
What a pointless article as TW again takes a trivial issue (not the nuclear spill, the organic kitty litter) and builds a mountain out of a molehill so he can have a go at lefties and hippies and organic products and anyone else who doesn't fit in with his idea of how the world should be run.
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Thursday 2nd April 2015 08:48 GMT David Roberts
Word creep?
A lot of people seem to be treating the term "organic" as a food marketing term instead of meaning "(derived from) something living".
Which seems to be one of the significant differences between rare earths (umm...apart from anything diatomaceous...) and stuff derived from recently dead trees.
Still, you are all having such a gay time of it it is probably churlish to point this out.
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Friday 3rd April 2015 13:48 GMT x 7
Reading the report indicates that whoever filled the drum showed a fundamental lack of basic chemical knowledge.
Your don't -ever- store nitric acid (whether as acid or neutralised) on or in anything carbon based. In this case they had a mix of nitric acid and acid salts, neutralised with triethanolamine, in PVC bags, with an adsorbent layer of ground dessicated wheat husks.
So many things to go wrong, but the obvious is the risk of producing nitrocellulose = bang
Biting the hand that feeds IT
