Slashdot Mirror
New Material Can Soak Up Uranium From Seawater (acs.org)
A new adsorbent material "soaks up uranium from seawater, leaving interfering ions behind," reports the ACS's Chemical & Engineering News, in an article shared by webofslime:
The world's oceans contain some 4 billion metric tons of dissolved uranium. That's roughly 1,000 times as much as all known terrestrial sources combined, and enough to fuel the global nuclear power industry for centuries. But the oceans are so vast, and uranium's concentration in seawater is so low -- roughly 3 ppb -- that extracting it remains a formidable challenge... Researchers have been looking for ways to extract uranium from seawater for more than 50 years...
Nearly 20 years ago, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) confirmed that amidoxime-functionalized polymers could soak up uranium reliably even under harsh marine conditions. But that type of adsorbent has not been implemented on a large scale because it has a higher affinity for vanadium than uranium. Separating the two ions raises production costs. Alexander S. Ivanov of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, together with colleagues there and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and other institutions, may have come up with a solution. Using computational methods, the team identified a highly selective triazine chelator known as H2BHT that resembles iron-sequestering compounds found in bacteria and fungi.... H2BHT exhibits little attraction for vanadium but has roughly the same affinity for uranyl ions as amidoxime-based adsorbents do.
Nearly 20 years ago, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) confirmed that amidoxime-functionalized polymers could soak up uranium reliably even under harsh marine conditions. But that type of adsorbent has not been implemented on a large scale because it has a higher affinity for vanadium than uranium. Separating the two ions raises production costs. Alexander S. Ivanov of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, together with colleagues there and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and other institutions, may have come up with a solution. Using computational methods, the team identified a highly selective triazine chelator known as H2BHT that resembles iron-sequestering compounds found in bacteria and fungi.... H2BHT exhibits little attraction for vanadium but has roughly the same affinity for uranyl ions as amidoxime-based adsorbents do.
.. is enough for "centuries", then what we have should run out in less than a year? Seems somebody has trouble with numbers. While Uranium that can be mined is not nearly as plentiful as the nuclear-mafia wants you to believe, it should be enough for a few decades, given that no new reactors are constructed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I mean, it's cool that you can pull nuclear fuel from the ocean, but it still has to be enriched as presumably aqueous uranium has the same abysmal percentage of U-235 as the terrestrial ores that are already being mined. Now figure it out how to enrich it at the same time and watch as the world destroys itself building nukes from ocean water.
we have the asteroids to mine
much easier
It's amazing how many concepts and technologies have been predicted by early science fiction.
As soon as I saw the headline, I thought of Arthur C. Clarke's "The man who ploughed the sea" and how it is a cautionary tale for people who think about investing with fast talkers.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
And ... that somebody is you.
In Economics 101, when a supply curve shifts to a lower price point (e.g. due to a technology such as this one) the demand curve almost always shifts to higher demand. And so every plenitude uptick is slated to run out in about a hundred years, no matter how much greater the new plenitude over the incumbent what-have-you-done-for-me-lately.
This phenomena is especially well known in the department of traffic congestion, which is why you can't build your way out of a snarl. Spanky new roads induce spanky new suburban commuter swarms emanating from spanky new gated communities.
There's also a bit of irony here that the Leela–Stockfish TCEC superfinal has just concluded with Stockfish winning by a hair (50-49, with game 100 in a position Leela can't win, and the TCEC client server momentarily 404). And sure enough, people are found in the chess comments sections complaining that Leela trains too slowly, given only petaflops do to her business.
Aww, shucks. Only meagre petaflops for an unfunded vanity project (yes, I admit, one that's super cool).
Plenitude: they just don't build it like they used to.
Lithium is extremely abundant in the sea water. It occurs at about 200 ppb in the ocean. The current sources of Lithium are salt flats and brine puddles in salt flats. So I wondered if a similar polymer can be developed using similar computational methods to extract other valuable metals like Lithium or Gold. Li is the lightest metal and U is the heaviest. So it might not be so easy for Li. Gold it could happen, but probably Gold is not as viable. If a gold extraction polymer is developed, the gold price will crash, and the invention will become worthless.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/164/164-h/164-h.htm#chap11 "Professor," said Captain Nemo, "my electricity is not everybody's. You know what sea-water is composed of. In a thousand grammes are found 96 1/2 per cent. of water, and about 2 2/3 per cent. of chloride of sodium; then, in a smaller quantity, chlorides of magnesium and of potassium, bromide of magnesium, sulphate of magnesia, sulphate and carbonate of lime. You see, then, that chloride of sodium forms a large part of it. So it is this sodium that I extract from the sea-water, and of which I compose my ingredients. I owe all to the ocean; it produces electricity, and electricity gives heat, light, motion, and, in a word, life to the Nautilus."
"That's roughly 1,000 times as much as all known terrestrial sources combined, and enough to fuel the global nuclear power industry for centuries"
So, 1000 times all known terrestrial sources will power the global nuclear industry for centuries. Which means all known terrestrial sources will last a fraction of a year. An all mined sources should run out tomorrow afternoon.
Journalists really are stupid people who will never let facts interfere with their storytelling.
the sea also contains massive amount of gold, copper, molybdenum, selenium, magnesium..... so what, all these extraction methods won't be useful
Radioactive water used in nuclear reactors contains more Uranium than seawater.
That sounds legitimately pretty neat.
But I wonder, can they do the same with plastic waste? That would be really cool.
Run the water through the U adsorbant and then through the one that picks up both. If all the U was picked out first, then vanadium should remain.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So it's okay for the US to take Japanese technology but not for anyone to use US technology! /s
LOL
Do we have the technology to deal with radioactive waste yet? No, then why to add more waste we can flush?
thought if you extract all of the stuff in sea water including water itself then you would make a bag of money.
If reporting on nuclear technology was like reporting on solar, we'd all talk about this idea all week, telling everyone that nuclear power was about to become incredibly cheap as the fuel costs drop to near zero.
Then if the idea didn't pan out, we'd all pretend we'd never said anything about it, and move on to another nifty-sounding announcement.
No, Mike Pence, the current vice president. You must be confusing him with another Mike Pence, the construct of your imagination.
Is there all of a sudden a safe way to use Uranium? Do We want more meltdowns? Solid reaction rods are not safe and only about 12 percent of the Uranium is used. So We want To store danger Uranium underground forever? We need time to make total reusable resources work. The Thorium reaction cycle is the gateway to save the earth until we know how to make Solar, Wind and the required power storage cost effective and cheep.