New Era of Nuclear Power Hinges on Seawater Uranium Extraction
This year, the world will generate more nuclear energy than ever before. “The market, technology and policy foundations are in place for a new era of growth in nuclear energy over the coming decades,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) wrote in a report published last month.
“It’s clear today that the strong comeback for nuclear energy that the IEA predicted several years ago is well underway, with nuclear set to generate a record level of electricity in 2025,” stated IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “In addition to this, more than 70 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity is under construction globally, one of the highest levels in the last 30 years, and more than 40 countries around the world have plans to expand nuclear’s role in their energy systems.”
All that extra nuclear power generation is going to require a huge expansion of nuclear fuel production. So much, in fact, that the expansion of nuclear energy production capacity is expected to outpace the expansion of uranium production capacity on a global scale, and by a wide margin. This is expected to create a tight market and heightened competition to establish new uranium supplies.
As a response, scientists are trying to get creative about new ways to create or circumvent the need for uranium. And so far, China is winning the race. Chinese scientists are making great progress of developing nuclear energy reactors that are powered by thorium instead of uranium, and another team of researchers also just made a major breakthrough in a new way to source uranium from seawater.
This last development may mark a major breakthrough, as the world’s oceans are home to vast untapped reserves of the 92nd element. According to reporting from Semafor, “oceans are estimated to hold 5 billion tons of uranium, 1,000 times more than can be mined.” However, “the dissolved minerals are dilute and difficult to gather.” But a team of researchers from across China, in addition to a colleague from Taiwan, may have just cracked the code.
The scientists “developed an upgraded electrochemical method that requires less money and energy than any other seawater-extraction technique,” according to MSN News. The exact figures are nothing short of staggering. The method was able to extract 100 percent of the uranium present in waters from the East China Sea and 85 percent from the South China Sea. However, when using larger electrodes, the scientists were reportedly able to achieve 100 percent extraction from the South China Sea waters as well.
“The experiments also showed the energy required was more than 1000-fold less than other electrochemical methods,” writes New Scientist. “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.”
This breakthrough stands to solidify China’s place at the helm of the global nuclear energy industry. Currently, Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia are the largest global producers of uranium, accounting for nearly 70 percent of global production thanks to their naturally rich reserves. These new findings could allow China to join those ranks.
But the ability to extract uranium from sweater could also provide a critical point of entry for other countries that are not naturally rich in mineable uranium. “We need nuclear power as a bridge toward a post-fossil-fuel future,” Professor Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, told the Stanford Report way back in 2017, when this technology was a distant theoretical possibility. “Seawater extraction gives countries that don’t have land-based uranium the security that comes from knowing they’ll have the raw material to meet their energy needs.”
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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