Dr. Conca reports that U.S., Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible. And it seems the U.S. is in the lead. New technological breakthroughs from DOE Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach and the only question is, when will the source of uranium for our nuclear power plants change from mined ore to seawater extraction? Nuclear fuel made with uranium extracted from seawater makes nuclear power completely renewable. It is not just that the 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater now would fuel a thousand 1,000-MW nuclear power plants for a 100,000 years.
It is that uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously, so nuclear becomes as renewable as solar, hydro and wind. Specifically, this latest technology builds on work by researchers in Japan and uses polyethylene fibers coated with amidoxime to pull in and bind uranium dioxide from seawater. In seawater, amidoxime attracts and binds uranium dioxide to the surface of the fiber braids, which can be on the order of 15 centimeters in diameter and run multiple meters in length depending on where they are deployed. After a month in seawater, the strands are remotely released to the surface and collected. An acid treatment recovers the uranium in the form of a uranyl complex, regenerating the fibers that can be reused many times. The concentrated uranyl complex then can be enriched to become nuclear fuel. DOE says that finding alternatives to uranium ore mining is a necessary step in planning for the future of nuclear energy. And these advances by PNNL and ORNL have reduced the cost by a factor of four in just five years. But it is still well over $200 per lb of U3O8 and this breakthrough does not replace mining yet on price basis.
Re-Directed URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#5e6afd1d159a
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