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Central nuclear china
Fast and Cheap: New technology discovered in China can revolutionize nuclear energy production in a country where it is increasingly valuable.
A team of Chinese researchers developed an extremely energy efficient and low -cost -efficient technology to extract uranium from seawater through a electrochemical technique.
Why is this important? Because there are 4.5 billion tons of uranium in the oceans “But it is extremely difficult to extract you because it is highly diluted.”
Besides being more cheap than technologies so far tested, this methodology spends less energy – about 1000 times less – and extracts, through two copper electrodes, 100% of uranium atoms of a seawater -like solution in 40 minutes.
For reference, the devices so far conceived were capable of extracting only 10%at this time, denotes the
Increase the size and volume of the new devices-together with the possibility of stacking or connecting them to each other-could lead to “Industrialization of uranium extraction sea water in the future, ”writes the authors of the one published in the Nature This week, on May 12th.
Chinese nuclear industry imports almost all the uranium it uses, so this innovation is one step forward to the country one of the largest nuclear energy producers in the world (and which wants to become the largest until 2030), which is closer to creating it independently.
