Four billion metric tons of uranium sit dissolved in the world’s oceans right now, roughly 1,000 times the total identified in hard-rock mines worldwide. A US startup called Fluxnium just emerged from stealth with a plan to get at it, backed by $7 million in seed funding and chemistry licensed from the US Department of Energy.
The catch: extracting that uranium currently costs more than twice the market rate, and no one has proven it works at commercial scale.
The timing matters. Yellowcake prices have risen approximately 75% over the past five years, according to US Energy Information Administration data. US policy discussions target tripling nuclear capacity by 2050, yet the country imports the overwhelming majority of its uranium from a short list of geopolitically exposed nations.
Yes, let’s scrape the ocean floor bare so that nothing will remain alive there either! Remember, it’s not pristine nature, its undeveloped land (or in this case, ocean floor)
Not the ocean floor the ocean water itself is full of dissolved metals. One could theoretically filter it to obtain salt, lithium and micrograms of uranium, and fresh water in return.
This or burning all the coal, petrol, peat, trees
Hey, I hope this works. Might be good for the world for a lot of countries to not want each other’s energy reserves.
Between sodium batteries and the ongoing drop in solar panel production costs, they may have already missed their chance.
If there only were fucking multiple ways to conjure electricity out of thin air…
But there will probably never be magic tech like that
And using breeder reactors that 50,000 year figure could be pushed up to 5 million years.
