Shuttle Replacement Needs to Become a National Priority!!!

On Mon, 01 Aug 2005 21:28:28 -0700, Richard Morris
wrote (in part):


Ditto for the 3.3 ppb of uranium in seawater. 3.3 ppb is about 10,000
times less concentrated than any ore that has ever been successfully
mined. Gold is a lot more concentrated, and far more valuable, but I
haven't heard of anybody extracting gold from the oceans either. All of
the uranium that has ever been extracted from seawater would probably
fit easily in the palm of your hand. I will believe it can be done,
economically, when somebody builds a pilot plant producing uranium in
useful quantities (tons per year) over a period of one or two decades.
The oceans are not a friendly environment for high-tech equipment, and
it will take a considerable amount of operations to get an idea of the
real costs.

The last paper I saw on extracting uranium from seawater projected a
cost of about $1400 per pound, IIRC. It assumed that the plants would
be anchored in ocean currents to avoid the, apparently, crippling cost
of pumping the water through the filters. It also assumed that we would
burn coal to provide the required process heat. That does not sound
very practical to me.


The Japanese have been looking into this. One cost projection is
$120/pound. See below.

http://www.thegeorgiaguidestones.com/Up_and_Atom.htm

"One possibility for maintaining fission as a major option without
reprocessing is low-cost extraction of uranium from seawater. The uranium
concentration of sea water is low (approximately 3 ppb) but the quantity of
contained uranium is vast - some 4 billion tons (about 700 times more than
known terrestrial resources recoverable at a price of up to $130 per kg). If
half of this resource could ultimately be recovered, it could support for
6,500 years 3,000 GW of nuclear capacity (75 percent capacity factor) based
on next-generation reactors (e.g., high-temperature gas-cooled reactors)
operated on once-through fuel cycles. Research on a process being developed
in Japan suggests that it might be feasible to recover uranium from seawater
at a cost of $120 per lb of U3O8.40 Although this is more than 10 times the
current uranium price, it would contribute just 0.5¢ per kWh to the cost of
electricity for a next-generation reactor operated on a once-through fuel
cycle-equivalent to the fuel cost for an oil-fired power plant burning
$3-a-barrel oil."

40 Nobukawa 1994: H. Nobukawa "Development of a Floating Type System for
Uranium Extraction from Sea Water Using Sea Current and Wave Power," in
Proceedings of the 4th International Offshore and Polar Engineering
Conference (Osaka, Japan: 10-15 April 1994), pp. 294-300.