Climate change is such an urgent problem that, despite the difficulties with radioactive waste, nuclear power is again becoming in demand. At least until the moment when renewable energy sources such as solar or wind power are more widely used. The oceans are a good source of enriched uranium, but uranium is stored at the bottom in such small quantities that it is not economically viable to extract it. However, scientists at Stanford University (USA) have developed a new method that could triple uranium production. This means that we can get a new source of uranium, which will allow us to control the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A surprisingly large amount of uranium is found in the ocean in the form of positively charged uranyl ions. Its total amount is about 4.5 billion tons, which is enough to feed all existing plants for about six millennia. However, uranium mining has so far been too expensive and time-consuming.
The best way to get uranium from seawater is to dip polymer fibers coated with the organic chemical amidoxime into it. Uranyl ions attach to amidoxime and can later be recovered and processed into uranium fuel. The key questions to the effectiveness of this method are: how quickly the ions will attach to the amidoxime, how many ions will attach, and how many times the polymer fibers can be reused.
A team of Stanford scientists have come up with a conductive hybrid of carbon fiber and amixodymium. It is capable of absorbing nine times more uranium than previous fiber models. In an 11-hour test, the team managed to extract three times as much uranium, and a hybrid of carbon fiber and amixodym lasted three times longer than conventional amixodymium.
In 2012, Japan calculated that using the conventional uranium mining method, the price would be $ 300 per kilogram. That's about three times the commercial value, but right now the price has almost halved. “We still have a lot of work to do, but these are big steps towards practicality,” said study co-author Li Cui.
Dmitry Utochkin