Chinese engineers have found a material that increases the efficiency of extracting uranium from seawater by 20 times

If you look at the development plans announced by the Chinese authorities, you can find out that by By 2035, operating nuclear power plants in China will need 35,000 tons annually uranium. With the announced consumption of the Celestial Empire, the personal reserves of uranium will be sufficient for 5 years.

It is for this reason that Chinese engineers are actively looking for a solution to this problem, and therefore it was decided to turn their gaze to the world's oceans and seas.

After all, as calculations have shown, there is 1000 times more uranium in dissolved form in seawater than is contained in all uranium mines in the world.

And now scientists only need to figure out how to extract this uranium from the water, and on a campaign they found an option on how to do it.

How engineers propose to extract uranium from water

In fact, the idea of ​​obtaining uranium from the waters of the world's oceans is far from new. They began to talk about this even 70 years ago, but only in the 1980s were Japanese engineers proposed absorbents based on amidoximes, which were able to extract uranium from marine water.

True, the cost of one kilogram produced by this option turned out to be almost an order of magnitude more expensive than uranium produced by the classical method, and reached 1000 US dollars or more.

In the course of numerous experiments, Chinese specialists have obtained a new membrane for much more efficient production of uranium from the salty waters of the ocean.

So, according to published data, the developed polymer microporous "hierarchical" structure, which was impregnated with membrane amidoximes, proved to be 20 times more effective than other previously proposed options.

By using the created membrane, 9.03 mg of uranium was extracted from salt water in four weeks for each gram of membrane.

When forming their new membrane, Chinese scientists were inspired by the principle of the organization of mammalian blood vessels.

In principle, experts agree with the achievements of Chinese scientists, but so far specialists have several important questions: how the created membrane will behave during fouling marine organisms (which is inevitable during operation), as well as how uranium will be separated from the molecules of other substances, which are dissolved in large quantities in sea ​​water?

Scientists have shared the results of the work already done on the pages of the journal Nature Sustainability.

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