Stanford researchers have improved a technique for drawing out uranium from seawater:
Trace amounts of uranium exist in seawater, but efforts to extract that critical ingredient for nuclear power have produced insufficient quantities to make it a viable source for those countries that lack uranium mines. A practical method for extracting that uranium, which produces higher quantities in less time, could help make nuclear power a viable part of the quest for a carbon-free energy future. "Concentrations are tiny, on the order of a single grain of salt dissolved in a liter of water," said Yi Cui, a materials scientist and co-author of a paper in Nature Energy. "But the oceans are so vast that if we can extract these trace amounts cost effectively, the supply would be endless."
[...] Scientists have long known that uranium dissolved in seawater combines chemically with oxygen to form uranyl ions with a positive charge. Extracting these uranyl ions involves dipping plastic fibers containing a compound called amidoxime into seawater. The uranyl ions essentially stick to the amidoxime. When the strands become saturated, the plastic is chemically treated to free the uranyl, which then has to be refined for use in reactors just like ore from a mine.
How practical this approach is depends on three main variables: how much uranyl sticks to the fibers; how quickly ions can be captured; and how many times the fibers can be reused. In the recent work, the Stanford researchers improved on all three variables: capacity, rate and reuse. Their key advance was to create a conductive hybrid fiber incorporating carbon and amidoxime. By sending pulses of electricity down the fiber, they altered the properties of the hybrid fiber so that more uranyl ions could be collected.
A half-wave rectified alternating current electrochemical method for uranium extraction from seawater (DOI: 10.1038/nenergy.2017.7) (DX)
(Score: 1) by YeaWhatevs on Tuesday February 21 2017, @12:40PM
From that old Munster's episode where some con artists sold grandpa a machine that extracts uranium from seawater and Herman told grandpa he was duped. Grandpa insisted it was for real and went about fixing the machine. When the con artists found out they gladly took back the machine and refunded the money at Herman's insistence. Moments after getting back to their car there was a small scale nuclear explosion, obliterating their car.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 21 2017, @02:11PM
Why its taken half a century is an interesting story, you can get magnesium from seawater because some plants concentrate the hell out of it for you, then you process the plants, indirectly it comes from the seawater.
So for like half a century, there's gotta be a way to, I donno, turn farm raised Tilapia into high uranium concentration fish sauce. Or some plant or algae or some damn thing, but it never worked out. At least unclassified.
Another waste of time for half a century was electrorefining, we can turn "high concentration copper in water" into ingots of copper pretty easily on an industrial scale and if only we used the correct weird as hell electrodes at weird potentials then we could plate uranium onto electrodes and put the electrodes right into the heavy water reactor on the sub or whatever. Corrosion and electrorefining are the same thing just different economic results. Its very complicated and mostly unsolved at least for this purpose. Maybe someday you'll stick two really weird wires connected to an arduino and next thing you know the NRC will be really pissed off with you. This sounds similar to the article which I have not read in depth.
Ditto some games with chelation why if only we could find something more specific than EDTA that really liked eating uranium ions and not much else, then we'd be golden, or glowing anyway.
Its one of those engineering problems where the general appearance of the solution is very unclear so if a time traveler would just tell us "you idiots, skip all this stuff we never got to work, and focus on enzyme blah blah instead" then it would save a lot of wasted research effort.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @02:29PM
if this is true, i feel sooo relived 'cause it seems sooo much more easy to dig up the 500 x 500 km SAHARA desert,
dump the sand in some cauldron and grow silicon wafers for solar panels.
this "news" is just one of the propaganda pieces that wants us to feel that "radioactivity" is "natural" and thus "good for you", because
you know, nature is good .. like a flood or tornado or earthquakes or anthrax or ... plutonium.
on the other hand, the process requires electricity, so maybe this could turn out to be a great and tremendous investment:
build nuke plant to provide electricity to extract minuscule amounts of uranium from the ocean, which then gets dumped into the nuke again to repeat the process.
coupled with outlawing renewable energy this sounds like a tremendous opportunity for PROFIT!
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday February 21 2017, @03:39PM
Nuclear power is dangerous precisely because the reactions produce 4 orders of magnitude more energy than chemical reactions.
Molten slat reactors have the potential to capture this energy without requiring a pressure vessel to contain the radioactive compounds
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @03:58PM
it is true. orders of magnitude more ... thanks to the "light-speed" constant (c) in the equation (it's HUGE) even tho the efficiency of the conversion is not great.
however, nothing comes for free ... the dangerous physical waste lasts for a long time and the addition of "magnitudes"
of new energy into global-human-society will have future impacts, for sure.
we can see what the liberation of energy in coal, oil and gas did to the planet (not all bad but not all good).
now if we "magnitude this" the repercussions will be enormous:
imagine a exxon valdez and american-gulf oil spill put magnified by the "magnitudes of nuclear fission power".
3mile, Chernobyl and fukushima are are chronological in time and each one worst then the one before (like a trend?).
Each disaster requires energy to recuperate from. maybe we can define a magnitude of disaster for energy production where the "still working" sources of energy cannot provide enough energy to fix the disaster.
Not to mention that massive oil fires can burn really hot that humans without protection and ingenuity cannot approach the blaze and extinguish it.
For burning oil wells, maybe a distance of 50 meters is required. if we "magnitude" this for a future disaster then minimum distance would translate to ... 50 km?
however, human capacity to IGNORE shit is unlimited, so maybe we will just collectively take a step over the
"pile of dog poo" that's still to come?
"With great power comes great responsibility".
Is a human life time enough time to realize the power AND responsibilities for these kinds of energy sources? : )
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 21 2017, @05:47PM
If we'd quit friggin' burning goddamn uranium and move onto thorium, yes, especially if we design modular-type reactors like some of Toshiba's prototypes. Something that keeps the primary and secondary loops entirely separate, and has passive safety ("drain plug").
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 21 2017, @08:49PM
imagine a exxon valdez and american-gulf oil spill put magnified by the "magnitudes of nuclear fission power".
Because we'd ever throw tens of thousands of tons of nuclear fuel on a supertanker? In practice, we don't do that. Sure, there's more energy present, like years of energy in one place rather than days. But you greatly overstate the actual problem by orders of magnitude.
3mile, Chernobyl and fukushima are are chronological in time and each one worst then the one before (like a trend?).
You missed Windscale [wikipedia.org]. When one takes into account Windscale, which was worse than Three Mile Island, and that Chernobyl was the worst of the lot, there isn't an actual trend.
Each disaster requires energy to recuperate from. maybe we can define a magnitude of disaster for energy production where the "still working" sources of energy cannot provide enough energy to fix the disaster.
Hasn't been a problem to date.
however, human capacity to IGNORE shit is unlimited, so maybe we will just collectively take a step over the "pile of dog poo" that's still to come?
Funny how the most ignorant thrive off of argument from ignorance fallacies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:31AM
Go back and keep hitting refresh until the fukushima article shows up for you...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:29AM
Go back and keep hitting refresh until the fukushima article shows up for you...
Don't have to. Chernobyl was worse for a variety of reasons: 1) the Soviets tried at first to hide the accident rather than protect people; 2) Chernobyl released somewhere around an order of magnitude more radiation [wikipedia.org] into the environment (5200 PBq versus 340-800 PBq), 3) Fukushima had an ocean next door which soaked up a lot of the radioactive fallout in a relatively harmless way, and 4) reactor design was significantly worse for Chernobyl (positive feedback at one point when control rods first inserted and graphite-based system increased the risk via fire).
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:20PM
Windscale looks like another case of the people in charge ignoring the warninrs of the technicians.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @09:03PM
hey. i didnt want to replay on a sub-class( sounds strange doesn’t it? but my char type is like @ 6 or so .. call it small print and BIG SORRY!")
point was .. we are stuck in a way of life with energy consumption .. you &me (raise children (which is good)).
stuck with the situation i dont think, escaping in the same way(!) will solve the problem.
not here for a revolution, it would kill my message .. the planet revolves and lives SL0wly(*).
the people who don't care about the after-life should not be allowed to dictate the future for all ?
(*) everything "quicky kills": like the physical properties of "length, area, volume, dimension" which ALL try to override TIME(**)
(**) if you can read this you required some time. if you cannot then ...
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Tuesday February 21 2017, @10:16PM
Ok.. U3O8 is the normal form to ship it in overseas, it is not soluble in water and it sinks (8.3g/cm3), seems like a fairly easy cleanup doable with the same barges we use to build artifical islands and dredge harbours. Btw, water is a decent shielding (a few meters will shield an active core, and we don't ship it when hot enough to need more than a meter of concrete as shielding).
Heck, even if it was watersoluble and it didn't sink it would take dumping about 500 years worth of _global _annual civilian uranium usage before we manage to get even lake Eire to the point where it would be more than a curiosity for scientists.
(Btw, the stuff we ship active nuclear material in is designed to only get cosmetical damages when hit by a speeding train, being part in an airplane crash, and being dropped from towers)
So yeah, I can imagine it - a whole lot of politics, media and forum-chatter, but no significant imoact.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Tuesday February 21 2017, @05:09PM
Energy transport.
Centralised energy generation is useless if you lose most of it trying to get it to its destination.
This blows out any non-equatorial landmass being entirely solar-powered for a long time (yes, technically it's possible with huge investment and on small timescales, but we're already hitting limits of solar power efficiency - literally how much sun lands on the earth at that point - and energy demands are still increasing all the time), because you can't generate on-site and you can't import without an extra added expense.
Literally, just float an oil rig outside the national boundary, stick a fission plant on it, if it blows (Two recorded cases in history? Both of whom you can safely walk past the building still to this day), you sink it into 300km^2 of ocean which is a perfect barrier against radiation.
Nuclear power generates orders of magnitude more, is statistically not that more dangerous than, and is much cheaper, environmentally friendly, able to be sited locally, and easier than any other method of electrical generation. Per watt, all the fission stations in the world generate more, safer electricity than anything else.
Just because you don't understand this, is no excuse for the policy makers to kowtow to NIMBYs.
Site it out of populated areas. Build half-a-dozen small ones. No need to upheave 100's of square kilometers of habitat. No more power generation problems for the next few hundred years, so you can focus ALL your research on "the next big thing" rather than wasting money on solar, tidal, wave, etc. and associated subsidies.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday February 21 2017, @07:43PM
> Literally, just float an oil rig outside the national boundary, stick a fission plant on it, if it blows
> (Two recorded cases in history? Both of whom you can safely walk past the building still to this day)
You point still stands if you properly give credit to the US for being first and third in the nuclear meltdown business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident [wikipedia.org]
While longer than we'd all like, the list is really short compared to just about any other power generation technology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday February 22 2017, @08:32PM
Not sure I'd want it OUTSIDE the national boundary - having it within your own national jurisdiction would make things like defending against pirates etc a lot easier. Put it out near the edge though, yeah.
An artificial island would be better than a boat, I think. Bigger, more stable, less prone to bad weather, harder to steal.
Finally, use the energy from the nuclear plant to take CO2 from the air or sea & mix it with hydrogen from seawater to make carbon-neutral hydrocarbons. Transfer to a supertanker to take to mainland, for use in cars and/or power plants.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday February 21 2017, @04:02PM
There is enough Uranium already mined to last another 100+ years, all we need to do is is reprocess the "waste" that the current nuke plants have been dumping out for the last ~6 decades.
In that time we can get Thorium based power plants operational and on-line without ever having to mine another ounce of Uranium.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @04:48PM
supposedly thorium and uranium comes from mined ready-formed pure bricks (as in gold-bar-brick).
my attention span in mineralogy and geology class was comparable to the life span of a fruit fly (wat? two days?) but i think that mining thorium will also yield uranium and other stuff (in some classes .. errr ... cases).
it's all radioactive stuff and most probably it will be mined by carbon-based robots.
with uranium, the planet nearly got rid of it in time (decay); thorium is unfortunately taking longer and evolution of the pesky ape maybe went to fast for the planet and so we are in the situation were still enough of it is around to have the apes return earth to the regular fold of non-life bearing planets : P
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Tuesday February 21 2017, @05:03PM
In 60 years we may have practical fusion power plants. I just saw this lecture about the ARC (Affordable Robust Compact) reactor design and was very encouraged.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 [youtube.com]
The main takeaway from the lecture is that confinement in a tokamak scales linearly with the radius of the edible part of the "donut" and to the fourth power of the magnetic field strength. At the same time, cost scales with the cube of that radius. Recent commercially-available superconducting wires are able to remain superconducting at much higher field strengths than previous wires. A group at MIT has used these new wires as the basis for the ARC reactor design and is doing basic engineering research on some of the fundamental components.
The higher field strength allowed them to design a much smaller, and therefore much less costly reactor. It also allowed them to simplify the most complex part of the design, the neutron capture blanket and to make the parts that wear out modular and replaceable. Higher fields also improve plasma stability.
This is the first time I was optimistic that I might see viable fusion power in my lifetime.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @09:20PM
good good.
i heard you, sir
but sir: fusion needs to be simple.
humans create it. humans break it. not: NATIONS CREATE IT - NATIONS BREAK IT.
with fission, it is "NATION CREATE IT - n.korea" "NATION DESTROYS IT"
with fusion, it's LPG but for .. forever.
you can see why it is NOT desirable?
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday February 21 2017, @04:55PM
Go solar or wind.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @05:16PM
...slightly used.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @09:09PM
the have a HUGE pool.
it's in a building just beside the no.4 reactor that didn't blow up. however there was no news on its construction and also ... maybe they were smart in wasting a ton of japanese tax payers money in building it (clandestine).
anyways ... this pool of waste (all put non) is still active and if it should ever leak or ... leak it will dry (near the ocean) and either BLOW UP (invisibly) or contaminate the coast of japan for a much needed improved human evolution. maybe we should go there?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:35PM
If we start doing this large scale, what happens to the first step in all aquatic food chains?