Researchers Fish Yellowcake Uranium From the Sea With a Piece of Yarn (ieee.org) 126
Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at the U.S. Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and LCW Supercritical Technologies made use of readily available acrylic fibers to pull five grams of yellowcake -- a powdered form of uranium used to produce fuel for nuclear power reactors -- from seawater. The milestone, announced in mid-June, follows seven years of work and a roughly US $25 million investment by the federal energy agency. Another $1.15 million is being channeled to LCW as it attempts to scale up the technique for commercial use. The effort builds on work by Japanese researchers in the late 1990s and was prompted by interest in finding alternative sources of uranium for a future time when terrestrial sources are depleted. "[U]ranium in seawater shows up in concentrations of around 3.3 parts per billion," the report notes. "With a total volume estimated at more than 4 billion tons, there is around 500 times more uranium in seawater than in land-based sources."
See? (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm going to assume that's sarcasm, yellow-cake and the waste from a nuclear power station are very different things.
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How so?
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First off, yellow cake is unrefined, a lot of work has to be done to get the right isotopes out.
And then when the fuel goes through fission, numerous other isotopes of different elements are created, all with varying half-lives and emitting different radiation of varying levels. Depleted uranium is radio-active for billions of years and it's extremely toxic.
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Depleted uranium is radio-active for billions of years
DU is only mildly radioactive, about 60% the level of natural uranium, and emits mostly alpha particles, which don't penetrate the skin. If you have a warehouse full of DU, the biggest risk is accumulation of radon, which can be prevented with a ventilation fan.
and it's extremely toxic.
It isn't really all that toxic in practice. In high enough concentrations, uranium can cause kidney problems. Ingesting or inhaling uranium dust can cause cancer. But dust does not easily form, and people working with DU usually just wear gloves,
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Can your say Gulf War Syndrome [wikipedia.org]:
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ANYTHING which is mildly radioactive is so for billions of years. ANYTHING which is radioactive for billions of years is only mildly radioactive. The two properties are two side of the same coin. Or two parameters in an equation containing only constants otherwise.
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The waste that comes out of the reactor is arguably safer than what went in. It is less radioactive than when it went in. And uranium is already toxic. I'd love to see a real scientific analysis of this. I have always been unclear why the waste is so frightening. Compared to the plastic and chemicals we dump into the oceans, there is a much smaller volume of radioactive waste. Nobody complains when that uranium goes out the smokestack of a coal plant into the air, but you make it 1/10th as radioactive
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It's not that much smaller, it's about half, half of extremely deadly is still extremely deadly.
"Nobody complains when that uranium goes out the smokestack of a coal plant into the air, "
Except they do, and they complain a lot about coal pollution. And if radioactivity was the only pollutant coming from a coal power station then no doubt people would still be complaining about it if they lived down wind.
Re:See? (Score:5, Informative)
This proves we can dump the waste back into the ocean where it came from. The solution to pollution is dilution, and at 4 billions tons, the ocean is a great diluter
Dilution doesn't work with dumping because of currents and bioaccumulation. We figured that out in the 1970s. You are cordially invited to join us in this millennium.
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yellowcake does not bioaccumulate.
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yellowcake does not bioaccumulate.
Yellowcake goes IN, what you dump comes OUT. HTH, HAND!
Re: See? (Score:1)
1. Currents have very little coverage.
2. Because that was never concentrated. Sure if we atomize the waste and distribute it evenly across the ocean you are correct. But you know we'd just dump it in a few spots.
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Re:See? (Score:4, Interesting)
So why isn't that an issue with the naturally occurring yellowcake?
Bioaccumulation is a valid point, because nuclear waste is a different isotopic mix from the original uranium oxide. Bioaccumulating organisms see plutonium as being chemically like calcium, for example.
We shouldn't be "dumping" the waste anywhere, but building full-burnup reactors to extract all of the energy from it, which is the "radioactive for thousands of years" part. What's left will be a few useless isotopes that we can drop down a borehole in igneous rock, whereupon they will fade to background in about 300 years.
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Your idea of boreholes for waste has some merit, there is a company that's trying to do it now for decentralized long-term waste storage.
http://www.deepisolation.com/ [deepisolation.com]
Full Burnup reactors are cool thing, but nuclear proliferation concerns coupled with their requirement for a higher % enriched fuel mean they are probably a non-starter. You could build them in one of the current nuclear powers, but non-nuke countries are cut off from it.
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there is a company that's trying to do it now for decentralized long-term waste storage.
What is the point of waste storage being "decentralized"?
Why wouldn't it make more sense to pick the most geologically stable location and put it all there, so we only have one site to monitor?
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The problem is it can't be in ANYbody's back yard (e.g., Nevada) because TEH RADIATION OMG!
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>What is the point of waste storage being "decentralized"?
It makes the logistics of transporting waste much easier, and is an easier sell to the public.
Like this:
"This waste is already here, stored on the surface where tornadoes and floods and terrorists can get to it. If we get a leak in this pool it will be an environmental disaster. We want to put it miles underground, miles deeper than the deepest water wells into rock that hasn't changed in a million years."
Re:See? (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong basically everywhere. First, the Earth's oceans are not 4 billion tons, that's the estimated quantity of yellowcake in the Earth's oceans. The Earth's oceans are about 1.4 quintillion metric tons, so you were off by about 9 orders of magnitude. Second, see drinkypoo's reply.
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As opposed to that unnatural stuff that comes from the ground?
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You need to study up on frickin' sharks with lasers. Studies have shown that they are not good things.
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Obviously not organic!
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Like seafood and mermaids.
For some of us . . . mermaids are seafood . . .
. . . you insensitive clod, or our new overlord or something like that . . .
There is no organic uranium. (Score:1)
Uranium is, if found in seawater in the open ocean, free-range and hormone-free. If extracted without the trolling nets they use for tuna, I think it is even able to be certified dolphin-safe.
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[SELF : mixes up some nice toxic dinoflagellate "red algae" poison in your local ocean.]
This could pay for desalination (Score:5, Insightful)
Extracting any metals from seawater requires straining through large volumes of H2O. Because desalination has the same requirement, the two technologies will naturally go together. The uranium alone could pay for the whole process, with many other extractable metals as a bonus. Instead of conflict minerals, the world will have thirst minerals.
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Except if you do that you kill basically everything in the water. Ions are basically the most important thing for life in the ocean.
There is no threat that we will desalinate the entire ocean. All of the drinking water we produce that way not only ends up back in the ocean, but it picks up new minerals as it travels overland to get there.
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The amount of metals we would be taking out of the ocean is still minuscule in comparison not just to the total volume of water, but to amount that gets added every day in runoff from the land.
Iron is so common on land that it is one of the metals we are least likely to want to extract from the sea. In fact, we will want to add more iron to promote algal growth as a way of sequestering carbon.
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By separating things like U, Li, Au, Ni, etc from the sea waters, we can help pay for desalination.
Even smarter yet, would be to build a number of SMALL nuclear power plants around the coastal region, and use these as well.
Nuscale is perfect with some 60 MW / reactor. Put in 10 of these / site and you have 600 MW.
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Pretty much the same as coal & gas, eh?
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Yes, process heat from any source will help in making desalination more efficient.
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What could possibly go wrong with a lovely seaside view?
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Research on this (many decades of it) indicates that simple moored drift collection (letting ocean currents do all the work) is most cost effective, compared to dedicated circulation pumping (for uranium collection). But if you have desalinization plants anyway, this can be a bonus but not a huge one.
If all the urban areas of California were supplied by nothing but desalinized water the plants would ingest about 20 billion tons of water a year from which 60 tons of uranium could be extracted - worth about $
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I think you're assuming too high an efficiency for the Uranium extraction process.
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Running the numbers (Score:2)
"[U]ranium in seawater shows up in concentrations of around 3.3 parts per billion," the report notes. "With a total volume estimated at more than 4 billion tons, there is around 500 times more uranium in seawater than in land-based sources."
So if it's 3.3 parts per billion, that means there's 3.3 tons of uranium yellow uranium in a billion tons of water, and if there are 4 billion tons of seawater on planet, that means there are 13.2 tons of yellow cake uranium on the planet, give or take 1/500th (to account for the 1/500th of that amount in land-based sources).
Re: Running the numbers (Score:2)
This 2003 article in slate says the world produces 64,000 tons of yellow cake uranium per year, the numbers in this article seem 'off'.
http://www.slate.com/articles/... [slate.com]
Re: Running the numbers (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s 4 billion tons of yellowcake, I think there is 11 billion billion tons of water.
Re:Running the numbers (Score:4, Funny)
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And if there is a lot more seawater, there is a lot more yellow cake.
if there is more seawater, it will have come from ice melt. Glaciers seem high in radon [researchgate.net], but in looking around it seems that they are lower in uranium than seawater. (Sorry, I couldn't find a good figure for glacial uranium content. Seawater is around 3 ppb.) So actually, it seems like if there is more seawater, there will not be a lot more yellow cake, just a bit more — and the rest will be harder to get out.
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The 4 billion tons is the amount of uranium in the ocean, not the amount of water. The oceans have a volume of over a billion cubic kilometers, and one cubic kilometer is about a billion tons, so the total mass of the oceans is more than a billion billion tons.
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4 Billion tons is the amount of yellowcake in the oceans dummy. There are 4 billion tons of water in a single cubic mile and over 300 million cubic miles of ocean.
Re: Running the numbers (Score:2)
I don't think the 'dummy' comment was needed, several other readers found a way to correct my mistake without resorting to an insult.
I ran the numbers as I read them, then with a subsequent post said something looked wrong.
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One of my teachers' pet peeve was that people just plugged numbers into formulas without even considering plausibility. 4 billion tons of water is roughly 4 billion cubic meters of water (1 ton is 1000 kilogram is roughly 1000 liters is 1 cubic meter). That's 4 cubic kilometers (4*1000m*1000m*1000m). That's about the volume of Lake Zürich. For comparison: Lake Superior holds 3000 times as much water: 12000 cubic kilometers. The oceans actually have a volume of 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water.
Re: Running the numbers (Score:2)
I was questioning the numbers as I read them, because they didn't make sense, how did your teacher feel about students that question things that don't make sense to them?
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First of all, you misread. Then you questioned if there really is as much uranium in the oceans as claimed. You did not consider if 4 billion tons is a plausible number for the water in the oceans. Unsurprisingly, garbage in, garbage out means you got a meaningless result because you started your calculation with an entirely implausible number.
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Japan should have ... (Score:1)
... patented the method.
Then SCOTUS would have us pay royalties.
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Not really. There are some local variations in uranium concentrations in seawater, off the estuaries of major rivers fed from granitic mountains for example. Japan doesn't have much in the way of granite.
The Kuroshio ("Black Current") is a strong oceanic current that runs north-east along the southern shore of the Japanese Home Islands. The original Japanese uranium extraction experiments used this current to substitute for pumps and pipelines. They suspended the plastic fibre mats in static rafts and allow
Re:Enlighten me... (Score:5, Informative)
Why on Earth would this be made public?!
Because (a) it sounds consequential for non-proliferation but (b) it is not particularly so.
Triuranium octooxide is the major component of yellowcake; the current market value of the uranium extracted in the experiment was about $0.25, which was extracted at a cost of $25 million. Of course uranium prices are volatile, so the market value of the uranium extracted in the experiment has, in recent years, been as high as a dollar. And a scaled up production plant would be more efficient too. Still, there's a long way to go before it's competitive with mining.
Now granted use-value and market-value are two different things. If a country (a) had no uranium reserves and (b) had a coastline, it could, given a very, very long time gather enough yellowcake to, say, make a bomb, because you'd need thousands of tons of the stuff to feed into your enrichment process to obtain the required fissile isotopes. If you were a landlocked regime with nuclear ambitions and no uranium reserves, you'd have to compare the time and cost to this process to the effort of finding a dodgy merchant who will sell you yellowcake under the table.all arsenal. And most countries with no uranium can obtain it on the open market by starting a civilian nuclear power program.
Proliferation should scare you, but his particular development has almost zero marginal effect. Uranium is fairly common in the Earth's crust, which is why you find it in seawater, and even countries with zero commercially viable uranium deposits, like Pakistan, can scrape together enough domestically mined uranium to build a small arsenal.
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Because it's essentially useless.
This may eventually count as an early result from which something useful can be developed, but the odds aren't really that good. (Also, it's not the first such result...though I found just using a piece of yarn as the lure to be interesting.)
Yards and yards (Score:2)
...of yellowcake yarn.
Stupid (Score:2, Informative)
Switch away from Uranium and start using extremely abundant thorium instead. LFTRs could be installed at every LWR on the planet to chew through their "waste" stockpiles prior to their decomissioning, then just use said thorium for fuel.
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Thorium reactors are still more theoretical than practical, though I think I've heard that India is working to change that.
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The Indian plans to use thorium as a reactor fuel are based on mixed-fuel loads for PWRs and heavy-water reactors. The rest of the fuel mix is highly-enriched uranium (ca. 20% U-235) and LWR-derived plutonium, needed to provide the high neutron flux to breed thorium-232 up into U-233 which can be fissioned in-situ to produce energy and (eventually) electricity.
Thorium has previously been used as an adjunct in pebble-bed reactors, the engineering of which was not up to the task (the German THTR-300 and AVR).
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Great Analogy (Score:1)
Yellowcake is to a special form of powdered uranium as water is to a special form of powdered hydrogen.
Awesome!
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Potassium is more likely. It's often found in metabolism, and is actively concentrated by life. Then there's Carbon14, which is built right into the foundation, and when it decays to Nitrogen the configuration of the molecule is required to change.
Of all the CHON components, Carbon is the one most susceptible to radioactive decay. Deuterium is stable, and Tritium has too short a half-life to persist in the environment (and is also rare for other reasons). But Carbon14 is made all the time in the atmosph
There Has Been A Lot of Work Done On This (Score:3)
Research on extracting uranium from seawater using polymer matrix materials has been going for decades, with significant progress. The projected cost of extraction has fallen to as low as $350/kg, which is actually less than the peak spot market price of uranium hit in 2007, but higher than the 10 year average of about $100/kg.
This paper [sciencedirect.com] does a nice survey of this work up to about 2014, and does not include this most recent project. You can use SciHub to get the whole article but the abstract I link to provides a good summary of its key points which are:
The abstract gives a price range of $400-$1000/kg but if you read the paper the lower bound is really about $350, and obviously only the most cost-effective systems are going to be candidates for eventual commercial use. This latest work cited in TFA uses (potentially recycled) acrylic, and the focus seems to be on finding a better cost/performance ratio, whereas most of the research has focused primarily on performance. I would like to see this work put into context with all the other work that has been done, to see exactly what the advancements/benefits are.
But that won't be for a long time. We have proven uranium reserves on land good for over 100 years at current rates of use before the price will rise to $350/kg. The world produced $75 billion of electricity from nuclear power last years (at $30/MWh wholesale price) and the cost of the uranium to fuel it was $6.8 billion (using the ten year average price). At $350/kg the cost would be $24 billion, a significant increase in total electricity cost, but in the context of the trillions of dollars of economic output that runs on that electricity, one that could easily be absorbed. But the uranium in seawater is a 13,000 year supply, so it will not run out on any relevant timescale.
And if and when we need to use seawater uranium, one can expect that that $350/kg figure can be driven lower, with an additional century of research and a sustained focus on commercialization.
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Probably on the dark side of the moon.
Please relate these numbers to India's water (Score:2)
Just wondering if there is an expert here who can translate these levels.
It was recently reported [sciencedirect.com] that India's water supply in the Punjab region has concentrations of Uranium as high as 579 ug/l, well above permissible WHO limits of 30 ug/l. Measurements as high as 1440 ug/l have occurred elsewhere in India. As one point of reference, New York's water was reported to have a high of 0.1ug/l though the US as a whole was stated to have an average of 1.17 ug/l which means there are some places higher. Finland h
Sounds like a government program (Score:1)
If uranium is hard to come by . . . (Score:2)
Why is the USA giving 20% of it's uranium to Russia?
7 years for 5 grams? (Score:1)