While nuclear power doesn’t scare the crap out of me, the fact that it’s not a renewable source of energy does concern me.
Or did.
A new material inspired by the fractal-like nature of blood vessels can absorb 20 times more uranium from seawater than previous approaches. The team behind the approach believes it could provide a reliable energy source that could last thousands of years at current rates of consumption.
Uranium is the most common fuel for nuclear power stations but it is a finite resource. Earth’s seas are estimated to contain some 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium, 500 times as much as is held in its land mass, but extracting it from water is more expensive than mining it from rock. …
Linsen Yang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues created a polymer membrane riddled with small channels that branch into even smaller tunnels just 300 to 500 nanometres across, mimicking the way that blood vessels bifurcate into ever-smaller passages within mammalian organs and limbs. The material was impregnated with a compound called amidoxime, which binds to uranium ions. [NewScientist (4 December 2021]
Obviously, a few small scale experiments aren’t going to prove that the lack of renewability isn’t important. But it’s a step along the path.
