Posted on 07/01/2016 4:39:49 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
America, Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible.
And it seems America is in the lead. New technological breakthroughs from DOE’s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach and the only question is – when will the source of uranium for our nuclear power plants change from mined ore to seawater extraction?
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....
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
We had better hurry up and close all our power plants then, especially the ones in California near the ocean. Wouldn’t want to appear like we are superior or anything.
Heheh ... the law of unintended consequences waits in the wings.
The only thing keeping the US Government’s ability to recklessly spend going at the moment is the Petrodollar. This alone is sufficient to explain why we can print money like we do.
Whatever threatens the Petrodollar ultimately threatens progressivism in this nation.
Something like this is a whole lotta threat to the Petrodollar.
uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously, so nuclear becomes as endless as solar, hydro and wind
thorium salt reactors are the way to go.
Yes. If Trump were smart he would declare we are going to have an energy revolution - all of the above with funding going towards thorium reactors. At the present time thorium appears to represent the next big thing in the world of energy. I am also excited about advances in magnet technology that may provide a quantum leap forward in hydropower.
Surprised it is not talked about more, but the loss of power in long distance transmission lines seems to be forgotten in all of this green energy bullcrap.
Energy will change over the next decades in ways we cannot imagine. It is the key for a comfortable and productive society and those who extrapolate out present usage to 100 years are going to look pretty silly.
Nice, in principle - but beside the point, in practice.In reality, “renewable” is irrelevant; what is relevant is cynical criticism of anyone who is a patron of society because he/she is able to work to a bottom line.
All else is window dressing.
I think they mean that the uranium is being washed off the land and absorbed from the seabed, etc., so the uranium removed from seawater is rapidly replaced.
Nuclear plants are very expensive and take a long time to build. Financing and insurance usually requires government backing. That’s the biggest problem that needs to be solved.
If they can do this with uranium, why suppose that they won’t be able to do it with gold as well?
Government is the biggest problem that needs to be solved. Period.
They can.
Suck on that American-Anglo establishment globalists! For nuclear power and helps global warming. How will they kill this?
Seawater has gold in it, too... somewhere between 2 to 64 PPB.
The econuts wil claim it harms all kinds of sea life.
There is no shortage of Uranium for a long long time even assuming 100% electric production by nuclear and that is before you think about recycling spent fuel to recover Pu and U238 for breeding.
Except for the problem that the envirowhackos have made it impossible to construct a nuclear power plant.
Yep, they’ll find some excuse to restrict it.
Of course that’s only if they notice that it undermines the one fatal flaw of the US Government: that it’s lil’red wagon, and I do mean a Red wagon, is hitched to oil.
This should tide us over until fusion reactors are ready in 40 years. ;-) Fusion reactors have been only 40 years away since the 1960’s. Or maybe cold fusion. ;-)
It's in the article:
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.
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