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Chinese scientists have created a new material to extract uranium from seawater. It’s inspired by blood vessels

  • Researchers say their porous membrane, saturated with a chemical compound, is significantly more efficient than previous approaches
  • Oceans are estimated to hold more than 4.5 billion tonnes of the radioactive element that is used to fuel nuclear power plants

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With very low concentrations of uranium in seawater, it’s far more difficult and expensive to extract from the oceans than to mine from the ground. Photo: Shutterstock
Echo Xie
Chinese researchers have developed a new material – inspired by the fractal networks of blood vessels – that they say can extract 20 times more uranium from seawater than other approaches.
Uranium, a naturally occurring radioactive element, is mostly used to fuel nuclear power plants. As demand grows for nuclear power globally, the need for uranium is also increasing.

It is a finite resource, but since the oceans are estimated to hold more than 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium – about 1,000 times more than the reserves on land – extracting it from seawater could potentially be a more sustainable approach to nuclear power.

However, there are very low concentrations of uranium in seawater – estimated at 3.3 micrograms per litre – making it far more difficult and expensive to extract from the oceans than to mine from the ground.

Scientists saw the potential to use oceanic uranium to fuel nuclear energy in the 1950s, but it took until the 1980s for Japanese researchers to develop a way to extract it – using a chemical compound called amidoxime to bind to floating uranium particles.

The new research, led by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was focused on improving the adsorption capacity of this compound. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Sustainability in late November.

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