"Nuclear fuel made with uranium extracted from seawater makes nuclear power completely renewable. It’s not just that the 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater now would fuel a thousand 1,000-MW nuclear power plants for a 100,000 years. It’s that uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously, so nuclear becomes as endless as solar, hydro and wind.
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Uranium is dissolved in seawater at very low concentrations, only about 3 parts per billion (3 micrograms/liter or 0.00000045 ounces per gallon). But there is a lot of ocean water – 300 million cubic miles or about 350 million trillion gallons (350 quintillion gallons, 1,324 quintillion liters). So there’s about 4 billion tons of uranium in the ocean at any one time.
However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/?sh=4b704baf159a
#archer_nuclear
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Uranium is dissolved in seawater at very low concentrations, only about 3 parts per billion (3 micrograms/liter or 0.00000045 ounces per gallon). But there is a lot of ocean water – 300 million cubic miles or about 350 million trillion gallons (350 quintillion gallons, 1,324 quintillion liters). So there’s about 4 billion tons of uranium in the ocean at any one time.
However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/?sh=4b704baf159a
#archer_nuclear