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Quick, Just Show Me Where You Want It: Urine Could Be The Key To Cheaper Electricity

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Green yellow energy.

Urine: minus writing your name in the snow or peeing under a roommate's bedroom door, most of it gets wasted. But now researchers in England are experimenting with microbial fuel cells (MFCs) to draw pee power from yellow gold. *splashing all over the back of the toilet*

Prior to an injection of 25ml of urine, the MFC was producing 0.9 milliampere per metre squared (mA/m²), which increased to 2.9 mA/m² after one hour from the point of injection.


This amount of urine was sufficient for continuous energy generation over three days, at which point the performance began to plateau and returned to the power output level that the MFC was producing prior to the injection.

An estimated 6.4 trillion litres of urine is produced every year leaving the researchers to call urine a potential alternative energy source that has so far been neglected.

6.4 TRILLION LITERS?! That...is a lot of pee. Imagine if we collected all the cow urine too -- we'd have enough to fill a swimming pool! What we'd do with a pee pool is beyond me, but I would take a look at a picture of one and throw up. *gagging* I can already smell it in my mind. No word if clear, pure alcohol urine will produce even more power, but one time a guy flicked a cigarette butt in the urinal I'd just used and it exploded. Plus I've peed in a friend's gas tank and he got like 40MPG.

Urine could be the answer to cheaper electricity [physorg]

Thanks to Tom, who agrees it's not the urine itself we need to harvest electricity, but the force you use squeezing it out.

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