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Researchers Fish Yellowcake Uranium From the Sea With a Piece of Yarn (ieee.org)
Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at the U.S. Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and LCW Supercritical Technologies made use of readily available acrylic fibers to pull five grams of yellowcake -- a powdered form of uranium used to produce fuel for nuclear power reactors -- from seawater. The milestone, announced in mid-June, follows seven years of work and a roughly US $25 million investment by the federal energy agency. Another $1.15 million is being channeled to LCW as it attempts to scale up the technique for commercial use. The effort builds on work by Japanese researchers in the late 1990s and was prompted by interest in finding alternative sources of uranium for a future time when terrestrial sources are depleted. "[U]ranium in seawater shows up in concentrations of around 3.3 parts per billion," the report notes. "With a total volume estimated at more than 4 billion tons, there is around 500 times more uranium in seawater than in land-based sources."
See? Nuclear power is 100% safe! It is natural: it comes from the sea. Pumping the radioactive waste back into the sea will just return it to its natural state.
They say Fukushima water is the best.
Extracting any metals from seawater requires straining through large volumes of H2O. Because desalination has the same requirement, the two technologies will naturally go together. The uranium alone could pay for the whole process, with many other extractable metals as a bonus. Instead of conflict minerals, the world will have thirst minerals.
"[U]ranium in seawater shows up in concentrations of around 3.3 parts per billion," the report notes. "With a total volume estimated at more than 4 billion tons, there is around 500 times more uranium in seawater than in land-based sources."
So if it's 3.3 parts per billion, that means there's 3.3 tons of uranium yellow uranium in a billion tons of water, and if there are 4 billion tons of seawater on planet, that means there are 13.2 tons of yellow cake uranium on the planet, give or take 1/500th (to account for the 1/500th of that amount in land-based sources).
Ken
it will be around 30 x times more concentrated.
... patented the method.
Then SCOTUS would have us pay royalties.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Why on Earth would this be made public?!
...of yellowcake yarn.
Switch away from Uranium and start using extremely abundant thorium instead. LFTRs could be installed at every LWR on the planet to chew through their "waste" stockpiles prior to their decomissioning, then just use said thorium for fuel.
a little cat's paw - bat-bat-bat!
WMDs cannot exist in our peaceful planet. THIS! NEEDS! A! WAR!
We can have our Yellow Cake and Eat It Too!
Arthur C Clarke wrote a cool little story about this very idea in the 1950's. The idea being that you could extract any metal you like from the sea with a boat and some very specialized equipment. Since all water eventually goes to the seas, the erosion takes these metals and suspends them in solution in tiny quantities. You just need a large enough scale to make it economically viable. Wealth all for the taking.
Now we know where Iraq dumped all that yellow-cake. This probably could have prevented 9/11.
Yellowcake is to a special form of powdered uranium as water is to a special form of powdered hydrogen.
Awesome!
Nate
Could it be that this Uranium in the seawater (which is the origination of all life on the planet as we all know) could be the cause of the mutation that results in Evolution? If we extract the uranium out of the sea, we halt Evolution, therefore! Then again, we'll likely have blown away all the life there is to have evolved with the extracted uranium, so it would seem to be a zero-sum game. In the mean time, somebody's made a sh*tload of money, so "Filter away, guys!" which could be rephrased as "Run, Lemmings, run!"
A bit more honorable than the carbon-credit scam, I suppose.
Research on extracting uranium from seawater using polymer matrix materials has been going for decades, with significant progress. The projected cost of extraction has fallen to as low as $350/kg, which is actually less than the peak spot market price of uranium hit in 2007, but higher than the 10 year average of about $100/kg.
This paper does a nice survey of this work up to about 2014, and does not include this most recent project. You can use SciHub to get the whole article but the abstract I link to provides a good summary of its key points which are:
The abstract gives a price range of $400-$1000/kg but if you read the paper the lower bound is really about $350, and obviously only the most cost-effective systems are going to be candidates for eventual commercial use. This latest work cited in TFA uses (potentially recycled) acrylic, and the focus seems to be on finding a better cost/performance ratio, whereas most of the research has focused primarily on performance. I would like to see this work put into context with all the other work that has been done, to see exactly what the advancements/benefits are.
But that won't be for a long time. We have proven uranium reserves on land good for over 100 years at current rates of use before the price will rise to $350/kg. The world produced $75 billion of electricity from nuclear power last years (at $30/MWh wholesale price) and the cost of the uranium to fuel it was $6.8 billion (using the ten year average price). At $350/kg the cost would be $24 billion, a significant increase in total electricity cost, but in the context of the trillions of dollars of economic output that runs on that electricity, one that could easily be absorbed. But the uranium in seawater is a 13,000 year supply, so it will not run out on any relevant timescale.
And if and when we need to use seawater uranium, one can expect that that $350/kg figure can be driven lower, with an additional century of research and a sustained focus on commercialization.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
First I couldn't get pudding if I didn't eat my meat. Now I need to get yarn to get cake? Where will this end?
When America uses foreign innovation and invention, it's called "to build upon", but when it's the other way around they make accusations of "IP theft", with the motivation that we've agreed amongs ourselves that we have patented everything that is patentable, and so you are stealing from us. Hypocrites.
So producing yarn and buying lots of it will be seen as nuclear aspiration, make the country flagged as MDW bearer and susceptible target for a donation of democracy.
Just wondering if there is an expert here who can translate these levels.
It was recently reported that India's water supply in the Punjab region has concentrations of Uranium as high as 579 ug/l, well above permissible WHO limits of 30 ug/l. Measurements as high as 1440 ug/l have occurred elsewhere in India. As one point of reference, New York's water was reported to have a high of 0.1ug/l though the US as a whole was stated to have an average of 1.17 ug/l which means there are some places higher. Finland had the highest number with 6000 ug/l as their max.
But, given that a liter of seawater is about 1025 grams, seawater at 3.3 parts per billion uranium/seawater would seem to translate to 3.22 ug per liter of freshwater.
This would seem to indicate that many regions of the world have far higher concentrations of uranium in their groundwater than what is present in seawater.
The statement that their is 500 times more Uranium in seawater than on land could still be true because groundwater is a small portion of land and there is so much more seawater than groundwater. But it would seem that the best application of the technology due to higher concentrations available would be in cleaning the Uranium out of some of our groundwater supplies. That would help the people in those areas while providing a large portion of the Uranium to meet the world's needs. A region using a billion gallons of water a day (I don't think this is an unusual number for 10 million people or so,,, NYC is higher) is using over 8 billion pounds of water. If its uranium concentration is high enough that filters made of this material could extract a few hundred pounds per billion, you could reach tons per day.
Replacing the entire world demand of around 70,000 tons per year does not appear achievable without processing the much lower concentrations in seawater, but I guestimate by looking at tables of groundwater concentrations around the world that half of the world supply could be achievable and it could help pay for providing fresh water.
My question is whether I am translating ppm to ug/l correctly. If ppb is ppb of weight, I think it is correct. But if it is ppb of atoms, then it is way off because a Uranium atom weighs so much more than the average atom in seawater. Does anyone know?
Uranium is, if found in seawater in the open ocean, free-range and hormone-free. If extracted without the trolling nets they use for tuna, I think it is even able to be certified dolphin-safe.
Or are they planning to knit glowing socks and sweaters? Actually could be handy... OH! Glowing mittens! YES! Those would be nice. Keep your hands warm for years and years. :-)
We must invade the ocean before they use their WMD on us.
5 grams of yellowcake, 25 million in taxpayer funded money.
Why is the USA giving 20% of it's uranium to Russia?
If it takes 7 years to collect 5 grams, then the scale-up would be enormous.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Nearly any element can be found in any rock sample, if you have sensitive enough tests (assays). The thing that unifies all such situations is that they are uneconomic to process.
Who cares what the total Uranium supply in all the oceans is? That's like saying "there are 100 gigatons of Gold just waiting to be found on Earth!" You know, except for the hard parts of finding the Gold, building mines, running the mines, and making a profit, it's falling-out-of-bed level easy!
3.3 ppb Uranium in seawater qualifies seawater as an extremely low grade ore. You'd have to process an incredible amount of seawater to get a single gram of Uranium. And no one is interested in single grams of Uranium. It's tempting to think that, being water, a simplified extraction process makes it all better. Yeah, except for the corrosive effects of seawater on metals, the fouling by sea life, the mineral deposits, the costs of pumping billions of tons of water, degradation of the filter materials, and all the rest.
We still have trouble building commercially viable desalination plants. That's a much easier business case to make, and the engineering is simpler by far (primary input is water, primary output is water).
This also smacks of using particle accelerators to make gold. Sure, it finally made real the Philosopher's Stone (sort of), and the dreams of the alchemists (in a manner of speaking). However it is such a hugely impractical, costly, and tedious way of making gold, that no one does it this way except to prove the point. It costs far less to send geologists out into the field to find an ore body.