China Moves Towards Industrial-Scale Uranium Extraction from Seawater

Chinese scientists have revealed details of the technology for the most efficient method to date for extracting uranium from seawater. China needs this to replace imports of uranium fuel for nuclear power plants. Today, the country buys 13,000 tons of uranium per year, independently producing only 1,700 tons of this raw material. By 2040, China will need over 40,000 tons of uranium annually, a significant portion of which it intends to extract from seawater.

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According to scientists, the waters of the world’s oceans contain 4.5 billion tons of uranium, which is 1,000 times more than the uranium ore reserves in the bowels of the Earth. The concentration of uranium in water is extremely low – 3.3 mg per ton of liquid, which makes it difficult to extract it from this source. Japan was the first to extract uranium from seawater about 40 years ago. Then about 1 kg of uranium concentrate was obtained – the so-called yellowcake. There are no technical difficulties for such work, but they are economically inexpedient, which Chinese scientists decided to argue with.

Two factors hinder efficient extraction of uranium from seawater. First, there is the low adsorption rate of existing materials. Second, there is the difficulty of separating uranium ions from other heavy metals, particularly vanadium. Researchers at Lanzhou University Frontiers Science Centre have developed a technology that doubles the adsorption capacity of uranium and increases the efficiency of its separation from vanadium by 40 times.

As an absorbing material, the scientists used a promising class of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These are hybrid cluster compounds with the highest porosity to date. To improve the absorption properties of uranium ions and their separation from vanadium ions, the new MOF compounds were given the ability to change pore sizes under the influence of ultraviolet light.

During experiments with seawater and its imitation, the new material demonstrated the ability to absorb uranium ions at a level of 588 mg per gram of material. At the same time, the separation coefficient of uranium and vanadium ions reached 215 units, which surpassed all previous developments in this area. Scientists are confident that industrial extraction of uranium from seawater using the proposed materials is no longer a fantasy.

Previously, China planned to extract uranium from seawater on a kilogram scale no later than 2025, and by 2035 they expect to build a demonstration plant for industrial-scale uranium mining in order to ensure continuous production of uranium from seawater in the country by 2050.