Melinda (& Bill) Gates

Depleted uranium (U-238) has a half life of 4.5 billion years; we created this byproduct before knowing what to do with it, then we dumped it in the ocean, until we figured out that this also was a bad idea; now we spend billions a year to store it, while we spend billions more trying to create a solution to the problem we brought upon ourselves. TerraPower’s Traveling Wave Reactor (TWR) boasts the ability to use this depleted uranium, which in theory can lower the radioactive half life to as little as 100 years. The other good news is that 99.3% of uranium ore on the planet is also in this form (U-238), which means we could re-fuel these reactors for quite some time. 

The Third Option’s ultimate goal is to also burn up the 15 kilograms of enriched uranium / plutonium housed within each of the 6200 warheads that make up our current U.S. weapons stockpile; not having to maintain them would save another $4.5 Billion a year. Sixty-six warheads could power the entire U.S. for one year. We have 2400 “retired” ones just sitting around, waiting to be dismantled – that’s thirty-six years of power – after that, we could start dismantling our 3800 “active” warheads, saving just enough (100 should do it) to destroy all life on the planet, should we decide to go that direction instead.

The numbers suggest that we do not have enough water in the world to supply two billion people with the kind of water-wasteful flush toilets Americans currently use, so the Gates Foundation has invested more than $200 million toward a waterless solution to this issue. 

This Reinvent the Toilet Challenge has generated many designs, like the fully self-contained Nano Membrane Toilet developed by England’s Cranfield University. Closing the lid cleans the bowl and feeds the waste into two separate chambers; liquid is upgraded to “non potable water” for irrigation, etc., and solid waste is incinerated into ash (free of any pathogens), while creating a small amount of energy in the process. This not only drives the many processes within the toilet, but creates enough power to charge smaller devices like mobile phones.

Part of The Third Option’s Foreign Policy objectives include sending our kids, as ambassadors, to many countries where these types of new technologies are needed most. The hope is to teach people many ways to live fully self-contained lives, from housing and energy, to communication and agriculture; certainly, water and sanitation are an important piece to this puzzle.

Besides its obvious use in countries without sanitation systems, The Third Option would like to use it as an interim step to clean up the U.S. Meat and Dairy industry. 55% of all the freshwater in the U.S. goes to raising animals for human consumption. These animals need 216 million acres of the agricultural land, which in turn releases over 240 million metric tons of green house gases each year, much of it from either synthetic fertilizers, or methane gas coming from the cows themselves. The cows are fed corn to fatten them up, but corn is not digestible to them, thus creating more methane than natural grazing. Their feces adds an extra burden to the environment, contaminating our soils and water supply.

Anaerobic Methane Digesters (like Omni Processors) can convert all the methane waste of cows, generate electricity for the farm, replace greenhouse gas-emitting synthetic fertilizers with a safer organic version, and provide water to reuse in the highly water-intense process of meat production. 

Thanks to the Gates Foundation for directly investing in solutions that help both people and the planet. For ideas on how the rest of us could similarly invest, go to The Third Option.