Chinese scientists have developed a way to extract uranium from seawater, Interesting Engineering reported. The breakthrough could have major implications for making nuclear power cheaper and even more viable as an alternative to dirty energy sources.
Nuclear power often gets a bad rap because of the high-profile meltdown disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. But experts say it’s actually much safer than the public thinks, and has the potential to generate energy without the planet-heating air pollution that comes from sources like gas, oil and coal.
Another drawback to nuclear power, however, is that it requires uranium, an extremely rare, non-renewable metal. A new invention from researchers at the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology — an organic material that can extract uranium from seawater — has the potential to make uranium much less difficult and expensive to obtain.
Interesting Engineering described the newly developed adsorbent as “environmentally friendly, cost-effective, easy to synthesize, and with impressive mechanical robustness and recyclability.”
While seawater contains incredibly small amounts of uranium (so don’t worry about becoming radioactive after swimming in the ocean), the good news is that there’s a lot of seawater available, and it’s not as environmentally damaging to obtain as mining the rock. One ton of seawater contains just 3.3 milligrams of uranium, which is equivalent to extracting one gram of salt from 300,000 liters of freshwater, as Interesting Engineering put it.
Breakthroughs like these and others — China, for example, is developing the world's first meltdown-resistant nuclear reactor — point to nuclear power as a viable energy source of the future, alongside wind, solar and other renewables.
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Other notable nuclear projects include the construction of a nuclear power plant in Wyoming on the site of a former coal-fired power plant. The risk of a meltdown is significantly reduced by using liquid sodium as a coolant instead of water. A new method has also been developed by researchers at Virginia Tech that makes the entire process safer.
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