China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) has commissioned a seawater uranium extraction test platform, said to be the largest such test platform to be built in the South China Sea. The new marine test platform has the ability to carry out material verification and amplification experiments in real ocean conditions. It looks like China is committing to a permanent Ocean facility for testing uranium extraction.
Previously, Japan, USA and other countries have extracted a kilograms of Uranium from seawater but the cost was three to ten times more than land mined Uranium.
The company added that, in the future, the test platform will form a “two centres, one platform” seawater uranium extraction scientific research base together with a research and test centre and an international exchange centre, construction of which has just got under way. These facilities, CNNC said, will create a “world-leading” seawater uranium extraction technology development centre.
Seawater contains naturally occurring uranium at a concentration of about 0.003 parts per million. Although this concentration is very low – the average abundance of uranium in the Earth’s crust is about 2.7 parts per million and ore grades are many times greater than that – the oceans are estimated to contain some 4 billion tonnes of the metal. The total uranium resources in land-based ores recoverable at costs of up to USD130 per kilogram stands at around 3.7 million tonnes, so the oceans could be an important resource of uranium if it can be recovered economically.
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Lots of press on this. To me it looks like a raft with a shack. Not impressed yet, but we will see. With improved absorbents, tested in a real sea environment, seawater uranium may well be cheaper than terrestrial mining. However modern in situ leach terrestrial mining is very good and has almost no environmental impact, so there is no rush. Uranium is also energy dense, so countries with little uranium resources could simply stockpile it in a strategic reserve. Just a few warehouses, nothing like the vast arrays of tanks or enormous underground reservoirs needed to do the same with oil and gas.
Seawater mineral extraction would work better by placing the filters in the effluent of a OTEC system. Using hanging filters like these experiments (while low power since no active pumping is happening) works, it’s also low flow. If you hang the filter curtains in a major sea current that might improve the numbers a little bit, but it’s still slow. No real way to get around that other than to be where deep sea water flows fast.
Some barge based nuclear powerplant ideas do use active seawater once through cooling, you could put the filters on that too.
These aren’t pass through filters, that might benefit from a high flow rate. They’re just exposed to the water and absorbing uranium on their surface by chelation. The limiting factor isn’t flow, it’s the reaction rate, I believe.
I suppose flow might become limiting if you had a really, really large field of them, though.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/uranium-from-seawater#toggle-gdpr
The absorption is not just flow but also temperature dependent. I speculate that putting them in the warm exhaust cooling water of a large seawater cooled nuclear station would improve absorption. A quick calculation suggests there is more uranium in the cooling water than the nuke consumes.
Otherwise tropical seas with good currents (and no hurricanes) would be great.
Curious: While China doesn’t exactly have the most uranium reserves of any country, they are in the top ten. You’d hardly think they actually needed access to fuel from the ocean. Unless they were planning an absolutely huge expansion of their nuclear program.
I wonder if this is half an excuse to expand their oceanic claims even further?
By the way, while with current tech ocean extraction is more costly than mining on land, the EROEI is already good, and fuel costs are a tiny fraction of nuclear electricity costs, (Roughly a tenth of a cent or less per KWH) so the price hardly matters that much. Even the current cost of ocean extraction would be economic enough, if the regulatory burdens on nuclear power were relaxed enough to make it economical again.
I can imagine a few reasons to explore ocean extraction even if mined U is less expensive at the moment.
One may be the environmental aspects. We normally don’t associate China with anything environmental but they do play the long game and they have ambitions to repair their environment. Uranium mining is problematic from an environmental perspective and I guess if the mining operations had to restore their sites, the price for Uranium would be higher.
There is also probably more to it than just Uranium. The technology is relevant for a load of other minerals. If an ocean facility outputs a decent snapshot of the periodic system, the equation may change.
Then there may be the scientific exploration “human curiosity” aspect. It’s not all about short term profit. Some part of the species actually get a kick out of exploring and discovering new stuff so we take some risks now and then.
“We normally don’t associate China with anything environmental but they do play the long game and they have ambitions to repair their environment. Uranium mining is problematic from an environmental perspective.”
In terms of priority ranking, saving or enhancing the environment (or even promoting the welfare of their average citizens) ranks near the bottom of the CCP’s agenda. That’s not to say there may not be environmental benefits from mining uranium at sea rather than on land, but it may just as easily be their preference to discharge pollutants in the ocean where it’s not China’s problem to deal with.
It doesn’t have to be commercially viable if you want to buy uranium and no one will sell it to you.
The big obvious point is that you don’t want it to resell as electricity. You want it to build your own vast nuclear arsenal to match the other big boys.
From what we’re seeing in Europe these days: the ability to generate electricity while being subject to sanctions and blockades is as much a military advantage as nuclear weapons are.