Offshore project aims to scale up uranium recovery from seawater
US technology firm will examine how uranium-capturing adsorbents perform during exposure to the sea.
SuperCritical Materials’ patented adsorbent is designed to capture dissolved uranium as seawater passes over its surface. After a set exposure period, the material is retrieved and processed to recover the uranium. The world’s oceans are estimated to contain around 4.5 billion tonnes of dissolved uranium.
The company has partnered with the University of Michigan, USA, to develop and test the offshore systems for extracting uranium from seawater.
The project aims to address the practical challenge of using the adsorbent repeatedly at scale. To do this, the researchers will characterise its mechanical behaviour under the stresses of packing, deployment, exposure to the ocean and retrieval, as well as assessing different ways of packing it into nearshore recovery systems.
The team will also design and build prototype deployment and retrieval equipment.
Tests at the university’s Aaron Friedman Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory will use towing and wind-wave tanks to simulate waves, currents and other marine conditions before designs move to offshore trials.
The results will feed into future pilot systems, feasibility studies and estimates of operating and capital costs.
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