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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.
Chaithanya Balumuru, Krishnan Raja, Piyush Sabharwall, Vivek Utgikar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 210 | Number 9 | September 2024 | Pages 1593-1601
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2329834
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Laboratory-synthesized nanocarbon pelletized with titanosilicate (ETS-10) as a support matrix has been investigated for the capture of radioactive iodine present as methyl iodide (CH3I) in the off-gas streams produced during aqueous reprocessing of used nuclear fuel. The mass fraction of carbon in the sorbent matrix was 0.10. The effects of residence time and CH3I concentration were investigated using a continuous flow column setup to quantify the adsorption and desorption capacities of adsorbent under dynamic conditions from an air stream containing CH3I present at concentrations representative of those expected in the off-gas streams. Air with CH3I gas as a source in the column resulted in quantifiable CH3I adsorption with 0.98 mg/g of adsorption capacity. Laboratory-made nanocarbons had a larger adsorption capacity than those of the other carbons reported in the literature. Additionally, the adsorption capacity of nanocarbon on ETS-10 is compared to that of nanocarbon coated on cordierite in previous studies.