Reinventing the Toilet with Bill Gates

Last week the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced the winners of its Reinvent the Toilet Challenge with the top prize going to a solar powered model built by the California Institute of Technology.

The California Institute of Technology team won a $400,000 grant last year that enabled them to produce a toilet which can run without water and does not generate any pollutants – for only about 5¢ per day per user. As the winner of the Reinvent the Toilet challenge, the Caltech team won another $100,000 to perfect the device.

Caltech’s toilet is like any other toilet at the surface. The magic happens after the flush, rather than going into a septic tank or sewer, the water and waste is collected in an electrochemical reactor. The reactor, powered by solar panels, breaks down the waste into hydrogen gas, water, and solids. From here, the gas can be used to generate electricity, the water can be reused, and the solids, being inert, organic material, can be used as fertilizer.

Second place in the challenge was won by Britain’s Loughborough University for a toilet that produces biological charcoal, minerals, and clean water, earning them $60,000. The University of Toronto secured third place, earning $40,000, with a toilet that cleans waste, returning nutrients and clean water.

The goal of the challenge was to produce a low-cost toilet than can capture and process human waste without running water, sewer or septic access, electric connections, or sewage treatment systems. Being free of all these amenities allows the technology to be applied to developing areas of the world where it is needed most.

"Worldwide, there are 2.5 billion people without access to safe sanitation – including one billion people who still defecate out in the open and more than one billion others who must use pit latrines." – Bill Gates

Gates said he hopes that some of the new technologies will be commercialized within the next 2-4 years.

Could Thorium Power the Next Generation of Nuclear Reactors?

Nuclear energy has been a necessary evil, providing power in a way that is cleaner and more efficient than coal, but leaving hazardous waste and weapons-grade byproducts that pose a risk to everyone. However, there is a way to produce nuclear energy without any weapons-grade byproducts and waste that is only radioactive for a few hundred years rather than hundreds of thousands of years – and we’ve been able to do it since the '50s. The answer is Thorium.

Named after the Norse god of thunder, thorium could be the key to the 'greening' of the nuclear power industry. In addition to safer waste, thorium has a number of other benefits. It is 4x as abundant in nature than uranium, roughly 8% of which is located in the US. It is fertile, rather than fissile, which means reactions can be stopped when necessary making it virtually impossible to use as a weapon in a terrorist attack. Additionally, it even generates more energy per ton than uranium.

Back in the 1950s and '60s, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests, but the work was abandoned when the Military determined they could adapt uranium power for their naval fleets. It was also noted by the research that thorium could not be used to build nuclear weapons, which much speculation has pointed to as the reason thorium wasn’t used.

Today, the focus has shifted from nuclear weapons to green energy technologies, giving thorium a fighting chance. In January 2011, the Chinese Academy of Science launched a Strategic Priority Research Program named the “Advanced Fission Energy Program”. One of the program’s main projects is building a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR). A TMSR utilizes thorium energy by the development of molten salt and molten salt-cooled reactor technologies. They expect to have a 2MW TMSR within 5 years and a 1000MW reactor operational by 2035.