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Improving Uranium Extraction From Seawater, Inspired by Shrimp
New submitter Celarent Darii writes "Prospects for harvesting Uranium from seawater turned interesting by using shrimp shells as a sort of catalyst."
Researchers at ORNL presented their findings from a test of a chitin net for harvesting Uranium at the ACS fall meeting. From the ORNL press release: "In a direct comparison to the current state-of-the-art adsorbent, HiCap provides significantly higher uranium adsorption capacity, faster uptake and higher selectivity, according to test results. Specifically, HiCap's adsorption capacity is seven times higher (146 vs. 22 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent) in spiked solutions containing 6 parts per million of uranium at 20 degrees Celsius. In seawater, HiCap's adsorption capacity of 3.94 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent was more than five times higher than the world's best at 0.74 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent. The numbers for selectivity showed HiCap to be seven times higher."
Wikipedia says there's 3.3 mg uranium per m^3 of seawater and the volume of the world's oceans adds up to 1.3*10^18 m^3, which means that there's 4.4*10^12 kg of uranium in the oceans, or roughly 400 kg per human in a world with 10 billion humans. That's a lot of uranium...
I don't suppose much is known about the rate at which it replenishes, but I bet scientists will be able to find out about that long before we begin to see measurable depletion of seawater uranium on a global scale.
However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.
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