(Ocean photo by Sebastian Voortman from Pexels. Graphic by Code and Dagger.)
Take a leisurely stroll along the beach, let the ocean water lap up on your ankles and have no fear that you’re actually walking through tiny, tiny bits of uranium.
Count me among those who didn’t realize there were trace amounts of the radioactive substance in the sea — not enough to be dangerous to swimmers or sharks alike, but perhaps enough in the world’s oceans to become a sustainable energy source, could we only net enough of it.
Among those who did know, apparently, is Arizona’s Rep. David Schweikert (R), who last week introduced legislation in the U.S. Congress directing the secretary of energy to investigate “extraction of uranium from seawater.” It’s a high-tech gamble Schweikert has been discussing for years and one with which the Department of Energy and its national laboratories have been flirting.
“Instead of us who are not too far from the Grand Canyon where we do the drilling to pull uranium out of the ground, which is always controversial because you worry about water supplies, but we need uranium for all sorts of things in our society, what happens if there is never another land uranium mine again because we worked out the technology to pull uranium out of seawater? It has happened. It has happened,” Schweikert said on the House floor in 2019. “Where is the joy around this place that technology is breaking through and providing us this sort of clean energy future in things that were just sort of academic fantasies just a few years ago and the technology is breaking through?”
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Pulling uranium from seawater certainly does sound like a fantasy of sorts, but, like Schweikert said, it has happened.
In 2017, Stanford scientist and former U.S. Secretary of Energy Yi Cui argued that while concentrations of uranium in seawater are minuscule — “on the order of a single grain of salt dissolved in a liter of water” — the oceans are so vast that developing a way to extract them would give the world an “endless” supply of energy. (A rough calculation by the Canadian Nuclear Association estimates there are some 4.5 billion tons of uranium in seawater at any time.)
A year later, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory announced it had created five grams of yellowcake uranium, the powdered form converted and used in nuclear power, from seawater for the first time — not very much, but still.
“This is a significant milestone,” said Gary Gill, a researcher at PNNL, which is a Department of Energy lab. “It indicates that this approach can eventually provide commercially attractive nuclear fuel derived from the oceans — the largest source of uranium on earth.”
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As for how uranium got into seawater in the first place, the Canadian Nuclear Association said that it’s “controlled by steady-state chemical reactions between the water and rocks that contain uranium, such that whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, the same amount is leached from the rocks to replace it.” This way, the organization said, it “naturally replenishes itself.”
Schweikert’s legislation, formally H.R. 4353, has a long way to go to becoming law. It’s first stop is consideration in the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
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