Should you attempt to take a dip in the chilly North Sea, nuclear fuel will most certainly be the farthest thing from your mind.
Believe it or not, uranium floats in Earth’s oceans in trace amounts of just three parts per billion, but it adds up.
Combined, our oceans hold up to 4.5billion tons of uranium. That’s apparently enough to potentially fuel the world’s nuclear power plants for 6,500 years.
Countries such as Japan have examined the ocean as a uranium source since the 1960s, but previous approaches have been too expensive to extract the quantities needed for nuclear fuel.
Now researchers in the US are tweaking one of those concepts with the goal of making it more efficient and cost-competitive.
Japan developed an adsorbent that attaches the uranium-loving chemical group amidoxime to a plastic polymer.
The US Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy (ORNL) has looked at the binding process between the plastic and chemical groups and used that knowledge to enhance the uranium-grabbing characteristic of the amidoxime groups on the adsorbent material’s surface.
This and materials developed in Japan have been tested at the Department’s marine sciences lab.
Initial tests show that ORNL’s adsorbent can soak up more than two times the uranium than the material from Japan.
The work continues.