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Ling Xin

Chinese researchers have found a way to extract uranium from seawater at several times the target rate set by the US Department of Energy, putting China at the forefront of a global quest to tap into a vast source of nuclear fuel.
The team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Qingdao did this using a material they developed called PhosCage – a sponge-like molecular structure filled with phosphate groups that act as chemical traps.
In a statement, the researchers said they had recovered up to 50.4mg of uranium for every gram of the adsorbent from natural seawater samples – more than eight times the US target of 6mg per gram.
They then turned PhosCage into millimetre-sized beads that are easier to deploy and retrieve in the open ocean. The beads captured 22.55mg per gram and continued to work through seven cycles of reuse.
“This work opens up a novel approach to extracting uranium from seawater and lays the groundwork for adsorbents that can capture more uranium and eventually be used on a large scale,” the team from the CAS’ Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology said in the statement.

The technology could be particularly important for China, which has sizeable uranium reserves but uses far more than it produces as it expands the use of nuclear power.
In 2024, domestic mines produced just 1,600 tonnes of uranium – a fraction of the roughly 13,000 tonnes required by its nuclear reactors, according to the World Nuclear Association. That has left China heavily reliant on imports.
The world has about 7.9 million tonnes of known uranium resources on land. But the oceans hold an estimated 4.5 billion tonnes, much of it accumulated over time as uranium was washed from rocks by rain and carried by rivers into the sea.
The Mediterranean alone contains an estimated 12 million tonnes of uranium – enough to meet the world’s current nuclear fuel needs for about 180 years.
But getting at it is extremely difficult. A tonne of seawater contains only about 3.3mg of uranium, so the element must be sifted from vast quantities of water.
And uranium is not alone. Seawater is a soup of dissolved elements, some far more abundant than the prize itself. Vanadium is especially troublesome because it can stick to the same chemical traps, making the two difficult to separate.
For years, scientists at US Department of Energy national labs in Tennessee and Washington have tried to crack the problem. Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed special fibres that grab uranium, while Pacific Northwest National Laboratory tested them in flowing natural seawater from Washington’s Sequim Bay.


By 2016, the best US adsorbents were collecting around 6mg per gram after extended exposure to seawater. But the method remained far more expensive than land mining, and the DOE largely pulled back after its programme wrapped up in 2018.
The Qingdao team’s work overcame some of the major extraction hurdles, according to two papers published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials and Separation and Purification Technology.
For instance, in tests with several metals present, the bead-like material showed a clear preference for uranium, including over vanadium – one of the hardest elements to separate from it.
However, the experiments have limitations. The researchers collected seawater off the coast of Qingdao and ran 25 litres (6.6 gallons) of it through a laboratory flow system, instead of leaving the adsorbents in the open ocean, where waves, currents and marine life would make the job much harder.
Meanwhile, neither study put a price on the uranium it recovered. The researchers said further work would focus on scaling up the materials and bringing down the overall cost of extracting uranium from seawater.


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News

China

Researchers developed a material that they say opens up a ‘novel approach’ to recover the nuclear fuel from the world’s oceans


Researchers developed a material that they say opens up a ‘novel approach’ to recover the nuclear fuel from the world’s oceans.


United States

Chinese team extracts uranium from seawater at 8 times the US target rate

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Researchers developed a material that they say opens up a ‘novel approach’ to recover the nuclear fuel from the world’s oceans

Researchers developed a material that they say opens up a ‘novel approach’ to recover the nuclear fuel from the world’s oceans