Item — HN Reader

I wonder what is the risk of prions diseases.

> A 68 kg (150 lbs) body which contains 65% water will require 100 MJ of thermal energy before any combustion will take place. 100 MJ is approximately equivalent to 3 m3 (105 ft3) of natural gas, or 3 liters of fuel oil (0.8 US gallons). Additional energy is necessary to make up for the heat capacity ("preheating") of the furnace, fuel burned for emissions control, and heat losses through the insulation and in the flue gases.

> As a result, crematories are most often heated by burners fueled by natural gas. LPG (propane/butane) or fuel oil may be used where natural gas is not available. These burners can range in power from 150 to 400 kilowatts (0.51 to 1.4 million British thermal units per hour).

>Crematories heated by electricity also exist in India, where electric heating elements bring about cremation without the direct application of flame to the body.

>Coal, coke, and wood were used in the past, heating the chambers from below (like a cooking pot). This resulted in an indirect heat and prevented mixing of ash from the fuel with ash from the body. The term retort when applied to cremation furnaces originally referred to this design.

More eco-friendly option would be to use pellet or electricity.

6 comments

Prions are scary, but the fact that prions have presumably existed for just as long as life has existed on Earth, there must be something that keeps prions from replicating out of control and causing mass death and extinctions.

It could be, because cultures that were using human bodies, instead of burning or burying them, went extinct.

> Prehistory of endocannibalism controversy Whether or not endocannibalism was commonplace through much of human prehistory remains controversial.

A team led by Michael Alpers, a lifelong investigator of kuru,[14] found genes that protect against similar prion diseases were widespread, suggesting that such endocannibalism could have once been common around the world.[15][16]

A genetic study with a range of authors published by the University College London in 2009 declared evidence of a "powerful episode" of natural selection in recent humans. This evidence is found in the 127V polymorphism, a mutation which protects against the kuru disease. In simpler terms, it would appear the kuru disease has affected all humans to the extent we have a specialised immune response to it.[17] However, a study drawing from hundreds of resources in 2013 claims further that 127V derives from an ancient and wide spread cannibalistic practice, not related to kuru specifically, but "kuru-like epidemics" which appeared around the time of the extinction of the neanderthals who co-existed with humans. This allows the suggestion that cannibalistic practises may have caused diseases which killed the neanderthals, but not the humans because of the 127V resistance gene.[18]

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

>The earliest known reference to a requirement for a six-foot burial occurred in 1665 during the Great Plague of London. John Lawrence, the Lord Mayor of London,[13] ordered that the bodies of plague victims "...shall be at least six foot deep." The city officials apparently believed this would inhibit the spread of the disease, not realising that the true vector was fleas living on rats in the streets.

Let's hope that that "something" wasn't smaller populations.

There were smaller populations of humans, but not smaller populations of mammals in general.

With our skill at making meat, I wonder how true that is.

Bison are much better at making meat than we ever were, before we all but wiped them out. Google piles of bison skulls for a peek.

I think the comparison is hard more than it is obvious. There's an awful lot of humans, pets and livestock.

It does make one wonder about oral traditions of 'cursed' lands...

Something like 100 billion people have died in the last 50k years, and it doesn't really seem like prions from their corpses have been a problem.

"there must be something that keeps prions from replicating out of control"

Do you feel like we should roll the dice? If we roll a 6, it could be worse that the Plague and Covid combined

>> fuel oil (0.8 US gallons) > eco-friendly

For people who drove cars.. mostly a (once-in-a-lifetime) symbolical gesture.

It's more gallons than I'll probably use in my lifetime - I've driven maybe five miles in total when debating going for a drivers test and I'm now in my mid-thirties.

if you only count the amount you have driven in the drivers seat sure, but you have used far far more. You were inevitably a passenger be it in a car, bus train, plane, ship, etc... then there is the fuel used to transport everything you have ever bought. Starting with raw material extraction involving heavy machinery and then at each point on from there in transit between factories and warehouses until it ends up as a finished product at the store or delivered to your door. every step involved a internal combustion engine burning hydrocarbons.

Since prions are found abundantly in the head, just bury or lock away the skulls and treat them like nuclear waste. Compost or cremate the rest of the body.

This is a solved problem! My startup is building modern, cutting-edge catacombs where we're redefining what it means to have a huge, underground maze full of decomposing human heads.

I am in a similar market, but we are turning cadavers into headless server platforms.

Are your digital cants to the omnissiah iso-9001 compliant too?

Great! Legacy underground mazes full of decomposing human heads are such a pain.

I have no idea if this is true or not... and that worries me.

I think it's not, but, maybe?

It's just another Catacombs of Paris, which to be fair has stagnated, so maybe a new agile startup can do better.

It really is ripe for disruption. Will need significant upfront capital infusions, though, and really the ultimate play is on the cloud or possibly blockchain which has some bootstrapping issues. Watching this space closely.

Catacombs as a Service is really going to take off.

Alcor will do this for $80,000/head, are your prices competitive?

> cutting-edge

missed opportunity or subtlety mastery ?

Dark humor

I think your funding should primarily come from Kickstarter, I think that there will be very few lawsuits of people who want to deposit their skull.

Sounds like a civilized thing to do. Just hack off the head and store it in some permanent disposal site. Then a few centuries later our ancestors will have to move the nuclear waste because of some leakage and will dig up the skulls.

Clearly a savage had lived there amongst the nuclear barrels. Its mind altered by the radiation, chopping off those poor worker heads.

If it wasn't clear: /s

And yes prions might be dangerous but what you propose seems out of proportion.

Now hold on, I think you're on to something. We still haven't solved how to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to our descendants several millenia from now. What better warning than thousands and thousands of skulls piled around the hazmat?

There are already things like the Skull Chapel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Chapel that are basically tourist traps because of having a bunch of skulls.

Radioactive prions. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter.

Actually putting in into nuclear waste solves the problem forever

You could also put them in a jar and start a museum with them.

Or a big friggin fresnel lens.

In Iain M. Banks' Culture series, customarily, a ship Mind displaces (teleports) your body to the center of the nearest star on death. That way your atoms contribute to the star and will eventually rise to the surface and spread through the universe. Also takes care of prion diseases.

This would be a spectacular way to go! Well, post-go.

Set up one of those thermal solar power plants that are like a sea of mirrors and a tower with a boiler on top, then raise the body in a cage on a winch to the top.

"Head towards the light".

That would be a specular way to go.

a post-go go

Sound's like Orholam's Glare from the Lightbringer series.

What does any of this have to do with prions though? If anything, the emissions are probably worse from a public health perspective.

Cremation will destroy prions. Composting will not. I guess the issue would be with prions from a composting brain getting into food supply.

I’m not sure how real of a concern this is as deer with CWD die and decompose and I’m not aware of any transmission in this way.

I was of the impression that Prions are notoriously impervious to heat. They were said to withstand typical disinfecting protocols using an autoclave (250°F for 15-20min). Quick source:

> To destroy a prion it must be denatured to the point that it can no longer cause normal proteins to misfold. Sustained heat for several hours at extremely high temperatures (900°F and above) will reliably destroy a prion.

https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/diseases/cwd/what-are-prio...

I don't know the specific temperature profile of cremation, but I doubt it is sufficient.

Cremation actually goes well above that. Cremation happens around 1400-1800F.

https://www.cremationresource.org/cremation/how-is-a-body-cr...

Autoclaves are meant to destroy living material while preserving what's being sanitized, while cremation intends to destroy everything and preserve nothing. For that reason, there's a difference in both temperature and exposure times.

900°F is barely temperature of a campfire

You’re right that it withstands heat, but not cremation heat.

More eco-friendly is direct burial into the soil, I guess