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Subscribe to RSSLONDON -- Dead bodies will be burned to heat a swimming pool in the U.K. -- and the British government is considering adopting the idea across the country.
Senior lawmaker Sir George Young, the leader of the House of Commons, told The Telegraph newspaper that he would "die a happier man" if he could arrange for his cremation to provide heat for swimmers.
Redditch Borough Council is set to become the first local government body in England to use heat from a crematorium to warm a pool this spring, the newspaper reported.
"The government is aware of this particular scheme," Young said. "The Department for Energy and Climate Change will shortly be publishing its heat strategy and this will explore the potential for better recovery and reuse of wasted heat in schemes such as this one."
'Sick and an insult'
The Telegraph said the incinerators used to burn bodies reach temperatures of 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit and cited estimates that using the waste heat from the Redditch crematorium could save more than $22,000 per year.
Carole Gandy, the leader of Redditch Borough Council, was quoted as saying she was rather the energy was used than “just see it going out of the chimney and heating the sky.”
"It will make absolutely no difference to the people who are using the crematorium for services,” she told The Telegraph. "I do recognise some people might not like it, but if they don't they don't have to use our crematorium. I wouldn't want them to do that but they have to make that choice.”
Unison, a labor union representing public workers, has described the idea as "sick and an insult to local residents,” The Telegraph reported.
It added that Durham Crematorium, in northern England, was thinking about fitting turbines to its burners in order to create electricity that could potentially power 1,500 televisions.
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Leave a Comment:
Gives a new meaning to dead in the water!
We are nothing more than Duracells. Now we know for sure.
Funny, nothing better than a good sense of humor!
got theme music...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mCK05dgwgU
Why not the heat is being wasted anyway.... I bet we could safe way more than that just by catching the hot air from the bloggers, Oops I'm bad, I meant cry babies and whiners that blog here, We sure have a lot of those here don't we ....... LOL
I was thinking there was a "Soylent Green" joke in here somewhere...
I wonder if the royal family would agree to the furnace for heating humanity.
Gee I hope noone gets into hot water over this........
On the surface it sounds a little sick, but when you stop to think about it, this actually makes a lot of sense. Currently, the heat simply goes up the chimney and heats the air. Why not recover this waste heat and put it to good use. Any environmentally conscious person would have no problem with the waste heat from their cremation being used in this way, after all it will help reduce carbon emissions by reducing the amount of energy that needs to be generated by other means to heat the pool.
It's a fantastic way for the owners/CEOs of all those crematoriums to fatten their bank accounts even more. "Now taking bids on the power generated from burning these bodies...."
They aren't actually worried about the "wasted heat" -- it's the wasted opportunity to increase the financial profit that has them worried!
We have a big swim meet coming up I'm looking for a few extra bodies.
eww!!!!
Do the math.
Each cremation takes about 0.05 kilowatt hours of electricity.
There are approximately 18,000,000 cremations a year.
That is almost 1,000,000 kWh per year (900,000 exactly).
That's enough energy to power about 1000 homes for an entire year.
Couldn't find a conversion for heating pools.
If you spin it, it sounds bad. They're not burning people to heat a pool!
These furnaces need to run for hours to get up to temperature to 'work', very little of the energy will be from people, it will be from the Nat. gas or electricity that runs it. If the pool is adjacent to the furnace then why not?
I'll take an order of fries with that and a large coke.
I don't know why I think this way, but I personally don't care if my body was used for heating a home. why waste a good body by burying it in the ground when you can recycle it and use if for saving lives and what's left over, use it for heating homes.
Funerals are a waste of good money and time. If I am going to be cremated, at least let me heat a home for someone.
What Jim said, lol! Wait until Soylent Green hits the scene!
This is such a National Enquirer title. They are NOT burning bodies to heat a pool. They are using the secondary heat from a furnace that just happens to be used to cremate bodies to heat a pool.
Tech companies do this all the time. They use the heat generated by thousands of servers to heat the offices that are occupied by humans. Imagine that one of these tech companies had an employee daycare facility heated by this extra energy. Everyone knows that one of the biggest Internet traffic issues is Internet porn. That means that some lame reporter could have a title, "Internet Pornography Used to Warm Children!"
I've done my part to keep pools warm. This is an even better way to contribute!
Haha! And I thought I was the only one trying to keep the pools warm.
That's the part I stumble on. I could see such uses in industry. Anyway, clearly I need to go off and learn more about the UK's zoning, urban intensification patterns.
I had this friend his name was Marc with a C, his sister was like the heat coming off the back of an old TV
if they're going to use dead people's carcasses to assist in heating pool water they could also turn their bodies into Duraflame logs to keep the living warm & cozy in front of their fireplace.
Jim @ 1.6, Soylent Green was my first thought when I saw this.
This makes sense, but they probably shouldn't have told anyone.
A little creepy.
But if they don't remind you about it, it's fine.
.
I like the duraflame log idea. Salts that burn with the deceased person's favorite colors could be added. An accompanying CD with the person's last thought could be playing while he or she is finally reduced to ash, which is then swept up and the living continue on with their mundane lives. It fits perfectly.
Brings a whole new meaning to "body warmth".
There's just something creepy to me about that.
Yeah, what happens when they run out of dead people?
Queen Elizabeth: Oh dear, its a little chilly in this water. Butler! throw another corpse in!
Butler: Sorry your highness, we are all out of corpses!
Queen Elizabeth: That's ok, just go out and get a few peasants to throw on the fire. No jesters, please. They smell funny.
Hey, you gotta love anyone who is investing in alternative energy sources, right?
stacking bodies like cord wood
Run out of dead people? Are you kidding? We've got way too many on this planet as it is. There are roughly 7 billion of us...
But seriously, this is an energy losing proposition. In the US it is illegal to burn more than one body at a some (there are a couple of rare exceptions). And it requires more energy to cremate the remains and pulverize the bones (they do not get turned to ash in the cremation process) than you get from the remaings burning. Still, cremation is the way to go - cheaper, and the body takes up less space.
@The Quacked One
Did you have a point or just figured you'd take a moment to bitch about people who make money? Do you believe everyone who doesn't make a living off a welfare check is somehow "evil"? Do you have a life?
Wonder how much a cord of dead bodies sell for these days over in the UK ???
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs
Why wait until they're dead? I know a lot of useless Republicans on Welfare, here in Tennessee that could at least give something back to society. Can't we just label them "Witches" and be done with it?
Great Post trust 2112! I'm with ya all the way!
Someone's been smoking Lebanon.
trust2112,
Reminds me of Monthy Python The Holy Grail.
"Bring out your dead"!
"I'm not dead yet".
"Yes you are"!
Soylent Green is people!
Well, that is a bit gruesome...but actually, when you come down to it, rather practical. Really, what difference does it make what happens to your body, if you're dead, you're dead. You ain't usin' it anymore, might as well put it to good use for the living.
The article never said HOW it would be used to heat the pool. I highly doubt they'd have a pool over a crematorium and use the heat directly. They propbably use it to generate electricity, then use the electricity to power the pool's heaters.
Why is this such a big deal? The smoke has to go up the chimney either way, at least this way it's being used for something. How selfish are you to say that YOUR BODY'S smoke is not to be used for anything except to polute the atmosphere?
What about your trash? Is that not to be used for anything else either? What about your food waste from restaurants, is that not to be used for anything else either?
The crematoriums will stay exactly the same, the facility around it will change. If they hadn't told us, you would have NEVER have known.
I think it's just like washing your hands with the same water that fills your toilet tank... PRACTICAL!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WaterSavingToiletJapan.jpg
Okay, we have crematory heat warming swimming pools and (potentially) powering TVs. Ain't life (and death) grand!
I'm glad I swim in the ocean and don't watch TV.
I don't know about the UK, but here in the U.S. I think this would be a gret idea, especially given the obesity rate here.
wonder what they will do about the smell? If you have ever smelled the odor of burning human flesh, you know that the smell never leaves your nose. i used to be a volunteer firefighter did a body recovery from a mobile home. that was 15 years ago sometimes i still catch a whiff of it. instantly get nausuated when that happens
I agree this is an excellent idea. Using wastes or byproducts (waste heat in this case) from one process to help do something or provide a resource for another product or process is nothing new and actually should be promoted much more. Spin it and try to look at all the negatives (typical of authors and media these days) if you want but at the end of the day the person is dead and so what if the heat from the furnace is used for something else?? No can't do it because the heat came from a furnace that cremated bodies...so?? It doesn't hurt anyone nor does it take away from the funeral or grieving process itself. Like rando said above is not like they are burning the bodies to heat water of a pool directly next to the crematorium or anything. Or for the cartoon lovers a large calderon sitting on burning bodies instead or logs. In fact heating a pool is but one use and why that was all they came up with is beyond me. My guess is they will collect the heat and then run a generator to create electricity that will be used by the crematorium or sent back to the grid, just like other site based generation (like solar panels) would do. Someone else pointed out, and I agree, alot of the heat actually is coming from the natural gas that runs the furnace in the first place, so again why not?
It is time we stopping letting stupid hype and spin by the media control our thoughts. Try to look past that and step outside the box once in awhile; you'd be surprised by what you will find.
@capncaveman
There should be no smell if the crematorium is functioning properly. What you smelled was the burnt remains of a person, the heat in the crematorium burns everything so there are no remains to smell. Also there are regulations about emissions from such facilities so what does come out the chimney is thoroughly "scrubbed".
Soylent Green, anyone?
Ah, you beat me to it! lol
Give it time and this sick world leadership of ours will be offering us live babies instead of oysters to eat
Turbines that would power 1,500 tv's, now that put's a bit of a twist on watching The Walking Dead.
It won't be long now, that here in the USA, the kid's will be reffering to grand parent's as the old pair of carbon credits!
anyone else read the title as 'dead babies' and read it twice before you realised the mistake haha..
Interesting idea, but I would feel weird swimming in those pools. LoL.
Pool? My fat ass could heat the North Sea!
It isn't really the bodies generating much of the heat anyway it's the fuel used to get the ovens hot enough to burn. No reason not to use the heat.
"Hey, they may as well use the ashes for fertilizer too ! "
Double dipping?
"Dead bodies will be burned to heat a swimming pool in the U.K. ",,,,Thank God its not Live bodies "yet"
Yes...and since you say it will one day be live bodies, that means it WILL be. Becuase worthless idiots like you are ALWAYS predicting this dystopian future and even though your prediction record currently stands at 0 for 52,163, you still claim that THIS one will come true.
I totally perceived buddyboy's comment to be just joking around, like a lot of the posts on this story are people just having fun with it and making me chuckle a little. He is not a "worthless idiot". I really feel that we should leave name calling to the 5 year olds.
My thoughts were, what would happen in the UK if there was a sudden lack of dead bodies to burn? How would they heat their bloody swiming pools? What next, using the residual ash to fill potholes?
iamp- the same way they do now, expensively and inefficiently
If they were going to run the ashes through some pipe to heat the pools I could understand the uproar. The heat used to cremate any body is no longer any use to the body and therefore should be (if available) used for any purpose. I don't see any disrespect issues at all. Ok, for instance, a burning ember escapes the chimney are we supposed to chase down the ember? Same as the heat...it just goes up the chimney, why not harness that energy for a good purpose? It's a none issue
Ok, ugh. Debatable in concept. But to heat a pool? Really? Hey, let's just have a good ole' fashioned BBQ. I'll grab the Brats.
Ok, No pools, but what about Domino's?
Actually, the concept is quite sound. The crematorium uses a lot of energy to generate heat to burn bodies. A swimming pool heating system uses a lot of energy to generate heat to warm the water.
So why task the grid with twice the energy when both tasks may be accomplished by sharing energy? If it is a public pool, you're saving scarce public resources and potentially saving the pool from being axed in next year's budget deficit reduction play. This is forward thinking, saving both kilowatts and dollars in the process.
this is a great idea. so much energy is wasted every day. experts have said the energy wasted from treadmills, stairmasters, and stationary bikes at the gyms in nyc could power thousands of apartments, so why are gyms not harnessing that power and selling it back to the electric company (or lowering your monthly fees- ha!!! sorry couldn't say it with a straight face)? I understand the start-up costs would probably be fairly substantial, but after that, it's literally money in the bank...
Homework - you are right. There are many instances where the byproducts of certain activities or processes can have their waste repurposed. You mention gyms, this is another good example or potential. Might not work or be practical for a single homeowner with one bike or whatever but a centralized location like a gym that has many bikes, treadmills, ect, could make sense and should help lower the overall costs to do so. There are other things to look at but hey even if only that building was to benefit that still that much less energy that has to come from the grid.
Sad.
Why?
I don't know exactly.
It seems sad to me. I wish we had more respect for each other. I wish we were more important than using our dead bodies to heat a swimming pool.
And also, could you really have a real good time swimming around with that in the back of your mind? I don't usually mix images of death with fun times.
I guess I'm a woose. It just bothers me somehow.
They aren't using dead bodies to heat the pool. They are using heat from the process of cremation to heat the pool. Would it be sad if they were using residual heat from the pool to cremate people? No. There's no difference. The heat from the furnace is just wasted if they don't capture and use it elsewhere.
I would agree that there may be better uses for the heat, but it is better than not using it at all.
Wasting energy and disposing of cremated remains is more respectful how?
What's next- Soylent Green?
"Listen to me, Hatcher...you gotta tell 'em! SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!"
It's definitely energy efficient. Beyond that, I don't know what to say.
I think it funny that when an industrial nation like the UK thinks of doing something like this it is "practical", but I bet if the Nazis did the same thing when they burned their bodies, people would think it sick and immoral, so is it truly "practical", or is just desensitizing propaganda, to make us more ok with demented ideas. If they really want to cut cost, here's an idea, don't heat the pool.
Are you really that stupid? Or do you just not realize the difference between VOLUNTARILY allowing your ALREADY DEAD body to be used for this pracitcal reason and burning millions of Jews alive in an oven?
Sorry, idiot, but you just lost ANY credibility that you may have had, and as such, the rest of your comment is worthless.
Are you that blind, to think that either way it is any better. You're the one who thinks there is nothing wrong with using a crematorium for energy. Also get your facts straight, the Jews were not burned alive, the bodies were burned after they were killed, and I also don't really care if I lost ANY credibility in the eyes of someone, who is apparently morally bankrupt, and who doesn't know his facts.
OK UBALL, that's the second name calling incident for you on this blog. To the crematorium with you.
geez, vball14... Insulting someone right out of the gate...calling them stupid, then announcing (for all of us ?) that they has lost credibility..?
Do you think it might be possible for you to articulate your response without resorting to name calling?
BTW, Deets, I agree....just don't heat the pool. While, (shudder) thoughts of the Nazi genocidal practices quickly came to mind, it was quickly replaced by the fearful knowlege that human beings have lost their precious value everywhere on this planet.
How we treat our dead is what separates from the animals....both the two AND four legged variety.
When we start using the dead for heating pools, or for cannon fodder, or fence posts...whatever...what can be next? When we run out of dead bodies...where do we go looking for "fuel" replacements? Think about it.
I would tend to think there are other renewable, and not so ghoulish, sources of energy to be explored.......
Pam, The bodies are not sources of energy, It actually takes energy in the form of burning gas to cremate a body, You can not just light a body on fire, What is happening is the gas being burned that is used to cremate the bodies generates lots of heat, They are using the heat as an alternative source of energy reproduction, The people who have chosen to be cremated are being cremated whether the energy expended is used to generate additional energy so why not use the heat for a good purpose, I think the title sounds stupid but the theory is practical, However having said that I hope this does not lead to a new law that requires all bodies to be cremated as some people may not want that and afterall that is our last and ultimate freedom.
Nice spin to get everyone upset. The dead bodies are not heating the pool. The energy the crematorium uses to burn the bodies is being recycled.
Rather than worry about forced cremation, I think a more likely outcome would be for conservationists to start focusing on the wasted energy and emissions from the crematoriums and try to stop cremations or at least tax them to help save the planet from global warming/climate change -- an after death tax.
"Don't heat the pool"?! What a sadistic, savage, and primitive idea!
I was surprised at how far down the thread I had to go before someone actually pointed this out. Burning flesh does not produce any heat, it consumes heat. Try igniting a steak with your Zippo. It takes scads of heat input to evaporate all the water before whats left will actually combust. So "burning bodies really aren't heating anything. They're simply recovering some of the waste heat from the crematorium and putting it to a secondary use before allowing what's left to vent out the stack.
I wonder what a cord of dead bodies goes for nowadays.
pink - that was amusing.
Pam and Deets - you guys are missing the point and letting the spin on the title, just like oreally pointed out, trick you. You fell, probably once again, for the medias hype/spin hook line and stinker. Ignore the title and look at what they are saying. It is very practical, from a mourner or visitors stand point you would see no difference, and again, even though they chose to use use heating water for a pool, there are many other things that can be done with this energy. I understand the connection between the two, and the instant image people get in their heads can be unsettling and the crematorium probably would be wise to avoid marketing this (because of people who don't understand like yourselves) all over but at the end of the day instead of letting the heat go up the stack unused and wasted they are putting it to use. Like myself and others said its not like they have a large pool above a pit that they are throwing bodies into. The heat will likely be collected to create steam and then run a generator. And yes woodworker is right, bodies just are not a good fuel source anyways. Please try to use some common sense and get past the hype once and awhile.
Gee...how weird...a worthless labor union objects to being more efficient!
Donate my organs, use the rest for research, throw the left overs in the oven to power electricity, poke the remains with a stick, and then feed the flowers with whatever! I might have lived as usless but I'll not be dead that way! :D
Absolutely!! You got it right! In a way it's a great "life after death" plan.
I'm sorry, I would much prefer my cremation to help heat a swimming pool where people are going to be active and have fun than to heat a TV so someone can watch a rerun of AbFab.
Recapture the heat by all means, but to heat a POOL!? Why not allow the heat from crematorium to augment heat or hot water for the elderly and the much beset middle class?
They could make soup!
"Hey, the pool's getting warmer. Wait, were's Timmy?" said little Johny.
People get into an uproar over this and think it's wrong and then get bent over global warming. At least utilize the heat before it affects the atmosphere.
Not really a global warming issue. Our bodies are technically carbon neutral.
But the gas used to generate the heat to cremate a body is not, You can not just set a body on fire, You need to expend energy in the form of burning gas be it either natural or LPG to perform the cremation, But since the bodies are going to be cremated anyway then there is No Additional carbon being released into the atmosphere.
If we are creating energy from burning something, be it trash or dead bodies, we may as well harness it and put it to good use.
Burning trash actually generates electricity, Once certain ingredients/components of trash are ignited they continue to burn without needing additional external fuels such as Natural Gas,LPG,etc, A human body on the other hand will not just burn on its own, It needs a continued source of external fuel to continue the cremation process. But your point is taken, If we are going to expend the energy to cremate the bodies then we should harness the generated heat and use it to create energy
I think this is great. Mourner could take a swim in the pool and feel the warmth of their deceased love on.
Thats nothing, there are some people in larger cities that would like to recycle dead bodies and process them into food. Colored wafers to feed the hungry. But not disclose what they are made out of.