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SuperCritical Materials licenses technology for uranium seawater extraction
Last week, Austin, Texas–based nuclear fuel start-up SuperCritical Materials announced that it has secured a license from the Department of Energy for a patented uranium and critical materials adsorbent manufacturing process originally developed by a team led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
SuperCritical aims to use this license to extract uranium from seawater at an industrial scale in the United States and abroad.
Zhiwei Zheng, Fabiola Guido Garcia, Jianan Liu, Shinya Nagasaki, Tammy (Tianxiao) Yang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 8 | August 2024 | Pages 1475-1486
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2023.2300900
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Uranium has been identified as an element of interest for the safety assessment of a deep geological repository for used nuclear fuel. This paper examines the sorption behavior of U(VI) onto MX-80 bentonite and granite in Ca-Na-Cl solutions of varying ionic strengths [0.05 to 3 mol/kgw (m)] and across a pH range of 4 to 10. U(VI) sorption on MX-80 showed that U(VI) sorption gradually increased with pHm until pHm = 6, where it reached its maximum, and decreased slightly with pHm until pHm = 8, and then became constant. U(VI) sorption on granite increased along with pHm, reached the maximum around pHm = 7 to 8, and then slightly decreased with pHm. Both MX-80 and granite showed essentially no ionic strength dependence for sorption of U(VI). A nonelectrostatic surface complexation model successfully predicted sorption of U(VI) onto MX-80 and granite using the formation of an inner-sphere surface complex. Optimized values of surface complexation reaction constants (log K0) for the formation reactions of these surface species are proposed.