Chinese scientists have developed a way to extract uranium from seawater, Interesting Engineering reported. The breakthrough could have big implications in terms of making nuclear power less expensive and even more viable as an alternative to dirty energy sources.
Nuclear power often gets a bad rap due to the high-profile meltdown disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. However, experts say that it is actually much safer than the general public believes, and it has the ability to generate energy without the planet-overheating air pollution that comes from sources like gas, oil, and coal.
Another drawback of nuclear power, however, is that it requires uranium, an extremely rare, non-renewable metal. The new invention from researchers at the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology — an organic material that can extract uranium from seawater — has the potential to make uranium much less difficult and costly to procure.
Interesting Engineering described the newly developed adsorbent as being “environmentally friendly, cost-effective, easily synthesized, and with impressive mechanical robustness and recyclability.”
Though seawater contains incredibly small quantities of uranium (so don’t worry about becoming radioactive after you go for an ocean swim), the good news is that there is an awful lot of seawater available, and it’s not nearly as environmentally costly to get your hands on it as it is to mine rock. One ton of seawater contains only 3.3 milligrams of uranium, the equivalent of extracting one gram of salt from 300,000 liters of fresh water, as Interesting Engineering put it.
Breakthroughs like this one and others — for example, China is also developing the world’s first “meltdown-proof” nuclear reactor — are pointing to nuclear energy as a viable energy source of the future, along with wind, solar, and other renewables.
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Other notable nuclear energy projects include a nuclear power plant being built in Wyoming on the site of a retired coal plant, which drastically reduces the risk of meltdown by using liquid sodium as a coolant instead of water, and another new method developed by researchers at Virginia Tech that makes the entire process safer.
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