Upgraded technique for extracting uranium from seawater promises higher efficiency and lower costs

A team of chemists, materials scientists and engineers affiliated with several institutions in China, working with a colleague from Taiwan, has developed a new way to remove uranium from seawater that is much more efficient than other methods. Their paper is published in the journal Nature Sustainability.

The current method for obtaining uranium for use in nuclear power plants is mining it from the ground. Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia are currently the largest producers of uranium, accounting for nearly 70% of global production. Other countries such as the U.S., China and Russia would like to overcome their reliance on foreign providers of the radioactive element, and have been looking for ways to efficiently extract it from seawater.

The world’s oceans have far more uranium than ground sources, but it is highly dilute, which makes harvesting difficult and expensive. In this new effort, the team working in China has found a way to do it much more efficiently, resulting in lower costs. Notably, China builds more nuclear power plants than any other country and would very much like to be able to produce its own uranium.

The new method is essentially an upgraded version of a well-known electrochemical technique that has been in use for many years. The upgrade involved giving both positive and negative copper electrodes the ability to pull uranium from the water. This upgrade allowed for removing 100% of the uranium in lab samples.

Additional testing showed that the technique is capable of removing 85–100% of uranium from seawater, depending on its source. Testing also showed that the new method used approximately 1000-fold less energy than prior methods. That resulted in greatly lowered costs. The researchers found it cost approximately $83 per kilogram of uranium obtained. This, they note, is in sharp contrast to other adsorption methods that cost approximately $205 per kilogram, or $360 per kilogram for other electrochemical methods.

In a 58-hour experiment using 100 liters of seawater, their largest test setup extracted over 90 percent of the uranium present. However, the researchers acknowledge that their technique is still in its infancy—a way must still be found to scale up their approach to levels that could be used to industrialize the process.

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