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Most of the Earth’s surface is covered by oceans, teeming with a variety of life. Interestingly, these huge bodies of water also contain a distribution of depleted uranium
Most of the Earth’s surface is covered by oceans, teeming with a variety of life. Interestingly, these huge bodies of water also contain a distribution of depleted uranium ions. Extraction of these ions could potentially become a renewable fuel source for nuclear energy production. A recent study ACS Center for Science presents a new material developed for electrochemical extraction. This innovation is more effective than previous methods in capturing elusive uranium ions from seawater.
Nuclear power reactors release the energy naturally stored inside an atom and convert it into heat and electricity, literally tearing the atom apart; this process is known as fission. Uranium became the element of choice for this process because it is easy to fission, being unstable and radioactive in all its forms.
Currently, this metal is mined from rocks, but uranium ore deposits are limited. Yet the Nuclear Energy Agency estimates that 4.5 billion tons of uranium are floating in our oceans in the form of dissolved uranyl ions. This reserve is 1000 times greater than that found on land. Extraction of these ions has proven to be a difficult task, as materials for this purpose do not have sufficient surface area to effectively trap ions. Therefore, Rui Zhao, Guangshan Zhu and their colleagues wanted to develop an electrode material with numerous microscopic depressions and protrusions that could be used to electrochemically capture uranium ions from seawater.
To create their electrodes, the team started with a flexible fabric woven from carbon fibers. They coated the fabric with two special monomers, which were then polymerized. They then treated the tissue with hydroxylamine hydrochloride to add amidoxime groups to the polymers. The natural porous structure of the tissue created many small pockets into which the amidoxime could bind and easily retain uranyl ions.
In experiments, researchers placed the coated fabric as a cathode in natural or uranium-rich seawater, added a graphite anode, and cycled current between the electrodes. Over time, bright yellow uranium-based deposits accumulate on the cathode fabric.
In tests using seawater collected from the Bohai Sea, the electrodes extracted 12.6 milligrams of uranium per gram of active-coated material over 24 days. The strength of the coated material was higher than most other uranium mining materials tested by the team. Additionally, using electrochemistry to capture the ions was about three times faster than allowing them to accumulate naturally in tissues. Researchers say the work offers an effective method of capturing uranium from seawater, which could reveal oceans as new suppliers of nuclear fuel.
Source: Port Altele
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