use charcoal to purify water

[vancopower]

Since now we have charcoal in the game I though why not use it to craft some sort water filter. I've always considered this melting then boiling water mechanic kind of lame why not use the charcoal instead to purify water. Or at least make the boiling water option less safe, which is true in reality as well I pulled this info from a web site: 

Boiling water kills or inactivates viruses, bacteria, protozoa and other pathogens by using heat to damage structural components and disrupt essential life processes (e.g. denature proteins). Boiling is not sterilization and is more accurately characterized as pasteurization.

So yea boiling water kills microorganisms but still leaves harmful chemicals which can still have a great impact on your health.  Here is my suggestion make boiled water safer but with a smaller risk of catching dysentery as well. The only way to be safe 100% is to drink purified water either by using purifying tablets on unsafe water or by using charcoal filter which can be crafted at the workbench by combining  10 charcoal and 1 cloth which then will have 20 uses similar to whetstone and cleaning kit.

[Thrasador]

Well two problems...charcoal and activated charcoal are not the same. I researched making activated charcoal a few weeks ago along the same line of thinking, but as a filter for your pack to reduce meat smells and attracting wolves.

Activated charcoal is actually pretty hard to make on your own from regular charcoal....it would at least require dangerous chemicals from those car batteries we can remove from cars, but then you also have to also apply temperatures of like 500-700 degrees if I remember correctly which is way hotter than the forge furnace. It's not really practical to make in a small scale setting. It is typically made in giant tumbling furnaces in an industrial setting. So there's that...

Secondly activated charcoal is only useful to treat turbidity of contaminated water. It doesn't actually remove ANY viruses or pathogens or fecal coliforms. It ONLY removes volatile organic compounds like chlorine and whatnot.

You are much safer just boiling the water. Any hazardous chemicals that may be present in falling snow (not very likely in the first place) would be at levels of ppm or ppb and would take years or decades to make you sick or give you cancer. Since the game world is designed around you only surviving 500-1000 days before resources run out, the chemicals that may be in water are a moot point...

Nice train of thought though!

[Mroz4k]

Both of those arguments are already falling on one thing - we are all talking about treating water made out of melted snow. Unless you purposely picked up "dirty snow" to do it, the melted snow water is mostly very safe to drink right away. The Dysentery mechanic is not very accurate to the real life, it's just there to make water gathering a bit more difficult.

But let's assume that melted snow is not actually safe, and you need to treat it somehow. How much "harmful chemicals" do you think are contained in a fresh snow in the middle of Canadian wilderness after a world fell apart and there is no more industrial pollution? The answer is "none". In fact, you can be sure that such a snow is the purest water you will ever drink - because snow comes from the air. It's a water that got evaporated (turned to gas) and then flown somewhere high up into the clouds, where it turned to liquid water, then froze to solid snowflakes and then proceeded to fall down in a form of snow. Its a pure H₂O with no additives to it. So, the only "real" danger lies with the microorganisms, and in order to get rid of those, all you need to do is run the water through 100°C for 5 minutes, so boiling is the only thing that's necessary. Or, the Water Purification tablets which kill the microbes chemically instead.

13 hours ago, Thrasador said:

Well two problems...charcoal and activated charcoal are not the same. I researched making activated charcoal a few weeks ago along the same line of thinking, but as a filter for your pack to reduce meat smells and attracting wolves.

1

Technically you are correct, but even a regular charcoal has the same ability as active charcoal, but active charcoal is much more effective at it. Even regular charcoal absorbs harmful chemicals to it, so in a survival situation, I believe it would be possible to use regular charcoal as well.

Afterall, active charcoal is used to treat stomachache, and you can use regular charcoal to do that same thing as well.

[vancopower]

3 hours ago, Mroz4k said:

Both of those arguments are already falling on one thing - we are all talking about treating water made out of melted snow. Unless you purposely picked up "dirty snow" to do it, the melted snow water is mostly very safe to drink right away. The Dysentery mechanic is not very accurate to the real life, it's just there to make water gathering a bit more difficult.

But let's assume that melted snow is not actually safe, and you need to treat it somehow. How much "harmful chemicals" do you think are contained in a fresh snow in the middle of Canadian wilderness after a world fell apart and there is no more industrial pollution? The answer is "none". In fact, you can be sure that such a snow is the purest water you will ever drink - because snow comes from the air. It's a water that got evaporated (turned to gas) and then flown somewhere high up into the clouds, where it turned to liquid water, then froze to solid snowflakes and then proceeded to fall down in a form of snow. Its a pure H₂O with no additives to it. So, the only "real" danger lies with the microorganisms, and in order to get rid of those, all you need to do is run the water through 100°C for 5 minutes, so boiling is the only thing that's necessary. Or, the Water Purification tablets which kill the microbes chemically instead.

Technically you are correct, but even a regular charcoal has the same ability as active charcoal, but active charcoal is much more effective at it. Even regular charcoal absorbs harmful chemicals to it, so in a survival situation, I believe it would be possible to use regular charcoal as well.

Afterall, active charcoal is used to treat stomachache, and you can use regular charcoal to do that same thing as well.

Yes I was gonna say the same thing you don't need active carbon for making water filter. Active carbon is better used for direct consumption.  

Also snow in normal conditions is not contaminated, but this is the quiet apocalypse maybe loosing power instantly has affected some of the safety systems in the local industry and dangerous chemicals evaporate into the atmosphere. There was a documentary similar to this what will happen if the humans are instantly gone. One of the major catastrophes was leaving lots of factories unattended so dangerous chemicals will make acid rains and so on. I think that loosing power instantly would have the same effect.  

[Thrasador]

1 hour ago, vancopower said:

Yes I was gonna say the same thing you don't need active carbon for making water filter. Active carbon is better used for direct consumption.  

Also snow in normal conditions is not contaminated, but this is the quiet apocalypse maybe loosing power instantly has affected some of the safety systems in the local industry and dangerous chemicals evaporate into the atmosphere. There was a documentary similar to this what will happen if the humans are instantly gone. One of the major catastrophes was leaving lots of factories unattended so dangerous chemicals will make acid rains and so on. I think that loosing power instantly would have the same effect.  

Well losing power would turn most factories off so they would stop pumping out dangerous waste.

The big one is when power is being used for containment in an exothermic system.

If humans disappeared instantly the most dangerous thing would be run away nuclear reactions in nuclear power plants....

No more pumped water for water cooling, and no control over the fuel rods....that would pretty much take out and contaminate many areas on the planet....

[Thrasador]

5 hours ago, Mroz4k said:

Both of those arguments are already falling on one thing - we are all talking about treating water made out of melted snow. Unless you purposely picked up "dirty snow" to do it, the melted snow water is mostly very safe to drink right away. The Dysentery mechanic is not very accurate to the real life, it's just there to make water gathering a bit more difficult.

I kinda covered this in my last paragraph with the contamination in falling snow being "not very likely" and contaminates falling in the ppm to ppb range....

I was basically stating snow is pretty safe in the first place, unless you picked a patch where a wolf peed and had diarrhea on....

[Mroz4k]

18 minutes ago, Thrasador said:

Well losing power would turn most factories off so they would stop pumping out dangerous waste.

The big one is when power is being used for containment in an exothermic system.

If humans disappeared instantly the most dangerous thing would be run away nuclear reactions in nuclear power plants....

No more pumped water for water cooling, and no control over the fuel rods....that would pretty much take out and contaminate many areas on the planet....

This is getting a little bit off-topic, but still - most of the nuclear plants around the world are nowadays prepared for such an occurrence. We live in the age when EMP terrorism is a real threat, so nuclear plants need to be ready to deal with an EMP strike like the one you are describing. Even if humans were to completely disappear, computers would be in place to safely turn off the generators before a meltdown could occur. The only real danger to the plants would be if there was an EMP and no personnel was there to manually turn the generator off, or if natural disasters happen, as in there is a crisis that occurs in a very swift fashion, like the Fukushima plant getting flooded.

And as far as radiation goes, you wouldn't be able to filter that out no matter what you would do. 

And finally, plants blowing up would pose significant radiation thread only to their surrounding areas. Yes, there would be a worldwide pollution as well as the irradiated dust would be lifted into the atmosphere, but that kind of pollution would hardly be life threatening. Most of the species would probably get accustomed to that (possibly if multiple plants blew up, the ratio of the dust in the air would be high enough to be dangerous (in that case only solace would be to hide underground for an extended period of time)

We may not know much about the Long Dark catastrophe yet, but we can safely say that most of the humans survived the event and that there was an EMP strike of some sort. So it's safe to assume all the nuclear plants were safely turned off by their personnel.

[Thrasador]

Well because of the increased aurora borealis effect, I always assumed the "huge EMP event" was a massive solar flare from the sun that wiped out all power/electronics pretty much simultaneously....

[Mroz4k]

6 minutes ago, Thrasador said:

Well because of the increased aurora borealis effect, I always assumed the "huge EMP event" was a massive solar flare from the sun that wiped out all power/electronics pretty much simultaneously....

EMP would not hurt the personnel, who would be capable of turning the generator off manually. I also believe the Long Dark is some sort of huge EMP event. And like I said, nuclear plants need to be ready for such a scenario because these days, there is a real threat of EMP terrorism.

[JAFO]

On 7/28/2017 at 0:24 AM, Mroz4k said:

And like I said, nuclear plants need to be ready for such a scenario because these days, there is a real threat of EMP terrorism.

"Need to be" is not the same thing as "are". Believe me, most such plants are not ready for such a scenario. The costs and downtime would be prohibitive, and some of the most vulnerable components of the system, such as the massive step-up transformers and long-distance power transmission lines, cannot be protected short of putting them underground. Which means yet more massive costs and long downtimes.