“There are 4.5 billion tons of uranium floating around the Earth’s oceans, enough to power human civilization for millennia. A new electrochemical process can tap that supply at a cost of $83 per kilogram, half the price of previous methods,” reports The Doomslayer.
The New Scientist adds:
Chinese researchers have developed an extremely energy efficient and low-cost technology for extracting uranium from seawater…When tested with small amounts of natural seawater – about 1 litre running through the system at any time – the new method was able to extract 100 per cent of uranium from East China Sea water and 85 per cent from South China Sea water. In the latter case, the researchers also achieved 100 per cent extraction with larger electrodes.
The experiments also showed the energy required was more than 1000-fold less than other electrochemical methods. The whole process cost about $83 per kilogram of extracted uranium. That is twice as cheap as physical adsorption methods, which cost about $205 per kilogram, and four times as cheap as previous electrochemical methods, which cost $360 per kilogram.
Scaling up the size and volume of the new devices – along with potentially stacking or connecting them together – could lead to “industrialisation of uranium extraction from seawater in the future”, the researchers wrote.
China has built the first thorium reactor ever built, in the Gobi Desert: “Chinese researchers are currently testing a prototype molten salt reactor, an innovative type of nuclear reactor that significantly reduces the risk of meltdown and allows for continuous refueling without shutdown. Even better, the reactor is fueled by thorium, which is both more abundant and less easily-weaponized than uranium.”
Small nuclear reactors are coming to Virginia, a utility says.
Nuclear power is already “the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced,” notes Yale University’s Steven Novella. “Wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants,” notes an environmentalist. And “solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.”
Nuclear plants emit no air pollution, only harmless steam. Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. The biggest utility that generates wind power pleaded guilty to federal crimes for killing 150 eagles.
