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.
The world's oceans contain about 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium. The world consumes 65,000 tonnes of uranium a year. There are thus 70,000 years worth of uranium at current consumption rates in the ocean. The world land reserves of uranium are estimated at 7.6 million tonnes at a recover cost of $260/kg, this is 115 years worth.
The lowest current estimated cost of recovering uranium from seawater is something like $300/kg, a price point at which the cost of the uranium still has little influence on fission power economics, and not much higher than that cost of recovery cited above for the 115 year reserve on land. The current market price of uranium right now is about $80/kg (element, not oxide), but it fluctuates a lot. The recent trendline is something like $100/kg, though in the past it has spiked as high as $400/kg (current dollars).
There no need for uranium-for-seawater in the foreseeable future (i.e. this century), and as long as mined uranium can be had for $100/kg or so there will be no steps taken to commercialize seawater extraction. Research on the topic, like this one, continues with refinements in extraction chemistry and efficiency as the focus, but not looking at the most cost-efficient extraction method, since that is the realm of commercialization. When land uranium resources start to run out, and prices rise, that is when all of the research on seawater extraction will be put to use, with a new focus on industrial operation cost and efficiency.
We are never going to run out of uranium. Even with no breeder reactors, or any thorium reactors.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj