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."

Comments

This could pay for desalination

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

Re:This could pay for desalination

[110010001000]

Is this like the "Little Lisa Recycling Plant"?

Re: See?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh? The great garbage patch is where ocean currents naturally concentrate solid waste fom many diverse sources. That's kind of the opposite of dispersion.