Fueling nuclear reactors with uranium harvested from the ocean could become more feasible because of a material developed by a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The combination of ORNL’s high-capacity reusable adsorbents and a Florida company’s high-surface-area polyethylene fibers creates a material that can rapidly, selectively, and economically extract valuable and precious dissolved metals from water. The material, HiCap, vastly outperforms today’s best adsorbents, which perform surface retention of solid or gas molecules, atoms, or ions.
