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"There are 4.5 billion tons of uranium floating around the Earth's oceans, enough to power human civilization for millennia. A new electrochemical process can tap that supply at a cost of $83 per kilogram, half the price of previous methods."
"Chinese researchers have developed an extremely energy efficient and low-cost technology for extracting uranium from seawater, a potential boon to the country’s nuclear power ambitions. China currently leads the world in building new nuclear power plants, and shoring up its supply of uranium will help these efforts. ...
[Chinese researchers] have developed an upgraded electrochemical technique that is cheaper and requires less energy than any other for use with seawater. Unlike typical electrochemical systems, which only pull uranium atoms from water at the positive electrode, their device contains two copper electrodes, one positive and one negative, that can both gather uranium.
This approach was able to extract 100 per cent of the uranium atoms from a salty seawater-like solution within 40 minutes. ..."
From the abstract:
"Efficient uranium extraction from seawater has the potential to secure an abundant and reliable supply of nuclear fuel, providing affordable energy with minimized carbon emissions. Among the many extraction methods, the electrochemical route has emerged as a promising choice owing to its fast kinetics and materials regeneration.
The major challenges facing this technology, however, lie in its high energy consumption, low extraction efficiency and poor selectivity.
Here we show a bipolar electrochemical uranium extraction (EUE) system that combines cathodic direct electroreduction of uranium species and electrochemistry-assisted indirect uranium reduction at the anode.
The EUE device operates at an ultra-low voltage of merely 0.6 V, exhibiting an efficiency of ~100% for sources with a wide range of uranium concentrations (1–100 ppm).
This bipolar EUE system in natural seawater displays excellent uranium selectivity (above 85.3%), long-term stability (45 cycles), low energy consumption (1,944 kWh kg−1 U) and cost advantage (US$83.2 kg−1 U). This work opens an avenue to the electrochemical system design for sustainable recycling of different waste resources."
New way to pull uranium from water can help China's nuclear power push "Chinese researchers have a new method to extract uranium from seawater twice as cheaply as previous technologies. Their success comes as China needs uranium to fuel its unprecedented nuclear expansion"
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