Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable

r energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly i nexhaustible.

DOE?s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national labor atories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach ...

Original article slightly dated. Much more recent news of progress being ma de at PNNL here:

Am 19.02.19 um 18:50 schrieb snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com:

Yes, and while you are at it with the lot of water, you can simply dissolve the nuclear waste. Two birds with one stone!

Gerhard

ear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extr act uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is t ruly inexhaustible.

om DOE?s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national l aboratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reac h ...

Considering the article above, is there any way that the oceans could be

used in reverse as well? A safe way to remove the risk of radioactive byproducts by diluting them to a level that could not affect life at all?

Here is one opinion suggesting that breeder reactors would be better than dilution:

More research on this:

John

There won't be enough time to complete this research before the Earth bursts into flames, though, will there?

Reburn it and compact the ultimate waste into a glassy mass and dump it into a mid-ocean subduction zone.

Or dig a hole somewhere and throw it in. The only nuclear waste disposal problem is political.

Doesn't sound necessary:

r energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly i nexhaustible.

DOE?s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national labor atories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach ...

Now we just need a gizmo to extract nuclear power plants from sea water... so we have a place to 'burn' the uranium. :^)

George H.

Probably true. And just when we were getting so close!

Bah. I've seen this so many times: Extract xxx from seawater, most often it's gold or some other precious metal, this time it's uranium.

It's not going to happen.

Yes, when you calculate the total quantity of stuff dissolved in all of the ocean's water, you get impressive numbers. If you then work out how much water you need to treat, it's instantly obvious it's not going to work. Mining the stuff in the traditional way is far more efficient. Never mind that nobody wants nuclear power anymore.

Did they promise power 'too cheap to meter' too?

Jeroen Belleman

And military. You don't want it someplace where it could conceivably be dug up.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

ear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extrac t uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible.

om DOE?s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national lab oratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach .. .

Aren't they already doing that at Fukushima?

Rick C.

lear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extra ct uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is trul y inexhaustible.

rom DOE?s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national la boratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach . ..

So your back yard is ok?

Rick C.

The sun will start helium burning in about five billion years, but it will have grown large enough to make the earth uninhabitable in about a billion years.

Bits of the earth's surface are already bursting into flames a bit too often for comfort, but that's due to us putting extra CO2 into the atmosphere - a much faster process.

lear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extra ct uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is trul y inexhaustible.

rom DOE?s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national la boratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach . ..

You don't even need to reburn it or dump it into a subduction zone.

But it is by no means clear that the political problem is soluble.

Engineers like to solve problems. Politicians prefer to exploit them.

Donald Trump's border wall is ostensibly designed to solve the non-problem of illegal border crossings - which have been declining for the past 45 yea rs - but in fact offers him an excuse for racist dog-whistle posturing.

And at Sellafield.

Gerhard H.

I don't think nuclear power has any future in the scheme of renewables. You can do the math on how many new plants would need to be built to make up even 25% of domestic energy needs by 2050 - it's in the hundreds, we're building how many at the moment?

People don't want them near them, investors don't wanna invest in them, without taxpayer-footed guarantees of absolution (Price?Anderson act) the industry could never obtain insurance on the open market, socialism for them but capitalism for you.

something like 40% of France's fresh water resources go to cooling their plants, too, and fresh water is only going to get scarcer. You can build them on the ocean where they're more vulnerable like Fukushima. Pilgrim in MA is closing but in the past couple years on several occasions plant has to shut down, intake seawater too warm to operate efficiently. And the oceans are only getting warmer.

nuclear fission power generation has the look of a dead and obsolete technology. Anyway didn't you say we're all going to be burnt to a crisp in three years a while back?

Surely it would be easier to just pay someone in Pakistan 50 million bucks for an off-the-shelf warhead than try to Glomar Explorer some ruddy old waste out of a hole in the seabed or drag it out of a Nevada mountainside?

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There aren't that many people in Pakistan who could convert 50 million doll ars into a black market nuclear warhead, and one of the perks of being in t hat position is that intelligence agencies around the world will pay you a retainer to report any such approaches.

Uranium is a more common element than you might think. About 2ppm is present in most surface rocks. Mineable grade ore is very rare.

Tungsten and molybdenum are both rarer metals in the Earths crust.

I'm amazed that at 3ppb in seawater it is worth the effort but they have got very good at reversible selective ion binding chemistry these days. I wonder how many cycles the material can stand before it fails.