Uranium extraction has reached renewable status

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RegGuheert

RegGuheert

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According to this artcle, recent developments in the extraction of U308 from seawater have brought the price down to about $200/lb., which comes to a fraction of a cent per kWh. Since the supply of uranium dissolved in the ocean is virtually inexhaustible, the clear result is that this is equivalent to a renewable energy source:
Next Big Future said:
Uranium is dissolved in seawater at very low concentrations, only about 3 parts per billion (3 micrograms/liter or 0.00000045 ounces per gallon). But there is a lot of ocean water – 300 million cubic miles or about 350 million trillion gallons (350 quintillion gallons). So there’s about 4 billion tons of uranium in the ocean at any one time.

However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration.
Click to expand...
What is needed now is a way to transmute the products of nuclear fission into safe forms for disposal. Perhaps that will come along sooner rather than later.
 
RegGuheert said:
According to this artcle, recent developments in the extraction of U308 from seawater have brought the price down to about $200/lb., which comes to a fraction of a cent per kWh. Since the supply of uranium dissolved in the ocean is virtually inexhaustible, the clear result is that this is equivalent to a renewable energy source:
Next Big Future said:
Uranium is dissolved in seawater at very low concentrations, only about 3 parts per billion (3 micrograms/liter or 0.00000045 ounces per gallon). But there is a lot of ocean water – 300 million cubic miles or about 350 million trillion gallons (350 quintillion gallons). So there’s about 4 billion tons of uranium in the ocean at any one time.

However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration.
Click to expand...
What is needed now is a way to transmute the products of nuclear fission into safe forms for disposal. Perhaps that will come along sooner rather than later.
Click to expand...
More likely what we'll see first are HTRs which leave only a fraction of the radioactive waste behind. The down side is that the waste they do leave is much more radioactive, but that's another way of saying 'has a much shorter half-life', to the point where they are more reasonable to contain on human timescales. From vague memory w'ere talking something like 500 years to decay to a safe level, versus many tens of thousands (mainly Pu-239 with a 24,000 year half life) for the typical waste from a PWR.
 

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