How to make nitric acid from urine

Hi guys,

First of all, my name is Flavius and I am new here. I am still a student but Corona kind of ruined my school year.

I am really passionate about model rocketry and I need to make my fuel. I am also on a budget and KNO3 is pretty expensive here. So I want to know what ways I could use to make either nitric acid or potassium nitrate at home.

Hope this doesn't break rule 2, I do seem kind of supsicious:))

How to make nitric acid from urine
It turns out that something that is (usually) flushed down the toilet can actually be recycled into a number of useful products. Comprised of water, calcium, chloride, potassium, sodium, magnesium, urea, creatinine, nitrogen, uric acid, ammonium, sulphates and phosphates, urine’s beneficial ingredients can be separated from its waste, and used to make fertilizer, medicine, brain cells and, yes, gunpowder.

Why Do We Pee?

Fundamentally, the function of peeing is to remove waste from our bodies. As blood travels through your various organs, systems and structures, each cell deposits the waste from its metabolism of nutrients back into the bloodstream. In a well-functioning human, about 20% of the blood flows through the kidneys every minute; within the kidneys, millions of nephrons (tiny filters) clean the blood.

During this filtering process, a number of beneficial ingredients in the blood, like glucose, water and sodium that were filtered through the kidneys, are put back into the bloodstream. The rest is secreted out of the body in the form of urine; this pee, however, still contains some handy chemical elements like potassium and magnesium, as well as urea and nitrogen.

Throughout history, some smart and adventurous people with strong stomachs have devised a number of ingenious uses for their pee.

Gunpowder

Gunpowder is comprised of 75% potassium nitrate, 15% charcoal and 10% sulfur. While charcoal (historically made with wood) and sulfur (historically dug from the ground around volcanoes) have been relatively easy to obtain, potassium nitrate is not commonly found in nature. Early sources were found in caves where guano (bat poo) had combined with minerals from the cave walls; soaking and filtering the guano was an effective method, but there are only so many caves, and so much bat poo.

With an increasing need as gun warfare became more common, by the time of the U.S. Civil War, men were manufacturing potassium nitrate in huge amounts. One process, known as the French method, involved mixing manure with ashes, straw and urine; the mixture would be tended for many months, perhaps even a year, then filtered through more ashes and a bit of water. A second process, called the Swiss method, involved placing a sandpit directly under a stable; only the urine made it into the sand, which would be harvested and filtered in the same manner as the French method. Either way, it had to be a tough job.

Survivalists and gun enthusiasts today enjoy (well, maybe) making their own gunpowder. For the potassium nitrate, one recommended process is to put a lot of manure in a large drum with a drain, valve and filter screen installed at the bottom. Pee into it. Freely. Then add water for a total of about 300 gallons of yuck. Place it in a safe spot (far away from the house, if possible). After 10 months, pour it out onto shallow trays to dry.

Separately with a mortar and pestle or hand-cranked mill, grind charcoal (all natural, no Match Light) to a powder and set aside. Do the same with sulfur, which can be purchased in home and garden stores. Finally, grind the potassium nitrate. Experts warn not to grind the ingredients all together, since that would possibly explode in your hands.

For storage, the best minds suggest mixing the three powders together then adding a little stale urine so the mixture has the consistency of biscuit dough.

Fertilizer

High in nitrogen, human urine is an excellent fertilizer. Some sources report that, absent fecal contamination, your pee is sterile; finding this hard to believe, others recommend storing pee for six months prior to use, rather than peeing directly on your garden soil. Of course, do not use the urine of anyone who has a urinary tract infection or is taking a medication. Although some use pee to fertilize fruits and vegetables, it is recommended that it not be used around root vegetables. Experts recommend using your high nitrogen urine only about once or twice a month, as too much nitrogen can reduce yield and hurt the plants, in the extreme case even killing them.

Medicine

Really? Really. Recycled since ancient times, many cultures have found medicinal uses for pee. Hindus traditionally applied urine to the skin as a dermatological treatment, and the Chinese used it to treat wounds. In ancient Rome, it was used to whiten teeth, and in Auyervedic medicine; it has long been recommended as a cure for cancer. More recently, the French used it as a cure strep, by wrapping pee-soaked socks around their necks.

Alternative medicine fans today are increasingly drinking their own pee. Called urine therapy, it is based on the idea that a number of beneficial nutrients found in pee, like enzymes, vitamins and antibodies, are needlessly lost when you go. Among the many health benefits adherents claim urine helps with are cures for heart and autoimmune diseases, infertility and cancer.

Brain Cells

Making an end-run around the embryonic stem cell debate, a few ingenuous scientists have found a way to make neurons out of human pee. Actually transforming a few ordinary cells found in urine into neural progenitor cells. This new pee-technique takes only half of the time of other pluripotent stem cell making methods.

Applying another process, the neural progenitor cells turn into functional neurons in short order. When inserted into baby lab rat brains (express your outrage in comments) ;-), the pee-generated cells operate properly and do not produce tumors. It is anticipated that this new method can be expanded to create other kinds of cells, and that eventually, these pee cells will be used to treat a number of different human conditions.

When you think about, it’s not that weird. You eat healthy food and drink plenty of water, so it makes sense that your pee might have some good things in it. Perhaps the next time you have to go, consider walking out to the garden and returning some of nature’s building blocks back whence they came.

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[Urine Image via Shutterstock] Expand for References

Urine is great stuff; it’s a waste product that shouldn’t be wasted. Although urine is mainly water (95%) it also contains important chemicals that can be used to make gunpowder and fertilizer. The rest of the chemicals in urine are:

  • Urea (which is a nitrogen based organic compound)
  • Chloride
  • Sodium
  • Potassium
  • Creatinine
  • Various small amounts of ions and trace elements

    In this experiment, it is potassium we’re focusing on, but many of the other constituents, even the water, can be made use of.  This experiment shows you how to make potassium nitrate or KNO3 The K is the chemical symbol for potassium, N for nitrogen and O for oxygen. So you can see potassium nitrate s a mix of these three elements.

    Making the Potassium Nitrate

    Potassium nitrate is one of the main ingredients in gunpowder, so when the SHTF knowing how to make this, may well come in useful. The other ingredients in gunpowder are sulfur and charcoal.  Making potassium nitrate the tradition way involves a lot of manure (to supply bacteria), lots of urine (to supply the potassium) and about 10 months for it to percolate.

    How to make your potassium nitrate:

  1. Collect some manure in large container (needs some way of drawing off liquid like a tap or blocked hole)
  2. Add wood ash to the manure
  3. Mix in some straw (this helps to aerate it)
  4. Add urine, lots of it, over time to the wood ash mix
  5. .Stir every so often

ear the end of the process (about 10 months) add a good amount of water and drain off, collecting the liquor

What happens?

Step 1: Solution of potassium nitrate

Urea and any metabolized ammonia are oxidized by the bacteria in the manure to nitrate which react with potassium carbonate (in the wood ash). This forms a mix of soluble potassium nitrate and insoluble calcium and magnesium carbonates. The soluble potassium nitrate can then be drawn off from the mix in the liquid.

Step 2: Crystallizing potassium nitrate

To make the solid form of potassium nitrate used in gunpowder you need to crystallize the potassium nitrate out of the solution.

To do this:

  1. Boil up the liquor you’ve drawn off from the mix with charcoal. This removes the color
  2. .Filter off the charcoal through a cloth
  3. Now reduce down the liquid by gently boiling. You’ll see the liquid reduce in volume.
  4. Start to cool it when you have reduced the volume by about ¾.
  5. Using (ideally) a glass rod or long piece of glass, dip it into the solution, pull out and as it cools if you see white crystals forming you know it’s now a saturated solution
  6. .Cool this down as much as possible (surround the container with ice if you have it)
  7. Filter your saturated solution through a fine cloth, like gauze (or filter paper if you can get some).
  8. The crystals then need to dry out on the cloth or paper

    TIP: When you are forming crystals you can ‘start them off’ by seeding the solution with the crystals on your rod (step 5) and / or scratching the sides of the container with a glass rod. This creates a surface for the crystals to stick to. Once one crystal forms, the rest quickly form around it. One of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, is the sudden formation of masses of crystals in a saturated solution after scratching the sides of the container, it’s like magic.