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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.
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.
And if there is a lot more seawater, there is a lot more yellow cake.
The 4 billion tons is the amount of uranium in the ocean, not the amount of water. The oceans have a volume of over a billion cubic kilometers, and one cubic kilometer is about a billion tons, so the total mass of the oceans is more than a billion billion tons.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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.
Why on Earth would this be made public?!
Because (a) it sounds consequential for non-proliferation but (b) it is not particularly so.
Triuranium octooxide is the major component of yellowcake; the current market value of the uranium extracted in the experiment was about $0.25, which was extracted at a cost of $25 million. Of course uranium prices are volatile, so the market value of the uranium extracted in the experiment has, in recent years, been as high as a dollar. And a scaled up production plant would be more efficient too. Still, there's a long way to go before it's competitive with mining.
Now granted use-value and market-value are two different things. If a country (a) had no uranium reserves and (b) had a coastline, it could, given a very, very long time gather enough yellowcake to, say, make a bomb, because you'd need thousands of tons of the stuff to feed into your enrichment process to obtain the required fissile isotopes. If you were a landlocked regime with nuclear ambitions and no uranium reserves, you'd have to compare the time and cost to this process to the effort of finding a dodgy merchant who will sell you yellowcake under the table.all arsenal. And most countries with no uranium can obtain it on the open market by starting a civilian nuclear power program.
Proliferation should scare you, but his particular development has almost zero marginal effect. Uranium is fairly common in the Earth's crust, which is why you find it in seawater, and even countries with zero commercially viable uranium deposits, like Pakistan, can scrape together enough domestically mined uranium to build a small arsenal.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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?