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Uranium extraction: Fuel from seawater

Nature Energy volume 2, Article number: 17022 (2017) Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 06 March 2017

There are over four billion tonnes of uranium in the oceans that could be harvested for nuclear fuel, but current capture methods have limited performance and reusability. Now, an electrochemical method using modified carbon electrodes is shown to be promising for the extraction of uranium from seawater.

The International Atomic Energy Agency predicts that nuclear power production may increase by up to 56% over the period 2015–2030, with Western Europe declining, North America remaining stable or slightly declining, and the Middle East, South Asia, and China growing1. As a result of increasing use of nuclear energy, conventional uranium reserves could be depleted within a century. For this reason, uranium recovery from seawater has been identified as one of seven chemical separations that, if improved, would bring global benefits2. Oceans contain nearly 1,000 times more uranium than conventional ore reserves, and this fact has motivated several investigations over the past five decades into uranium recovery from seawater, with limited success3. After significant progress in the 1990s and early 2000s from researchers in Japan4 — who demonstrated the recovery of over 1 kg of uranium from seawater — the US Department of Energy established a research program in 2011 with the goal of evaluating and developing the full potential of the technology. Since then, adsorbent uranium capacity has increased from less than 1.5 g to over 6 g of uranium per kg of adsorbent5,6, but challenges remain in terms of increasing total adsorption capacity, the rate of uranium accumulation, and the reusability of adsorbents. Writing in Nature Energy, Yi Cui and colleagues at Stanford University, USA, now report an electrochemical method to capture uranium from seawater, demonstrating a ninefold increase in uranium capacity, a fourfold faster rate of uranium accumulation, and promising reusability behaviour compared to the best adsorbent materials developed for the same purpose, when using uranium-spiked seawater7.

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Figure 1: Alternating-current method for electrochemical extraction of uranium.

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  1. Costas Tsouris is in the Energy and Transportation Science Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831-6181, USA and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0512, USA.,

    Costas Tsouris

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Tsouris, C. Uranium extraction: Fuel from seawater. Nat Energy 2, 17022 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nenergy.2017.22

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