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SuperCritical and University of Michigan test offshore uranium recovery
The project will evaluate whether the company’s uranium adsorbent can be deployed, exposed to seawater, and retrieved repeatedly at industrial scale.
SuperCritical Materials Corp. has partnered with the University of Michigan to test whether its uranium-from-seawater technology can withstand the mechanical demands of industrial-scale offshore deployment, Mining.com reports. The research will examine the mechanical design, prototyping and testing of offshore systems that use SuperCritical’s licensed adsorbent technology to capture dissolved uranium as seawater flows across the material’s surface.
After a defined exposure period, the adsorbent is retrieved and processed to recover uranium. The partnership is intended to move the adsorbent approach toward the engineering challenge of deploying large quantities of the material, exposing it to seawater, and recovering it repeatedly and efficiently under marine conditions.
According to the report, the University of Michigan program will study how the adsorbent behaves under different mechanical stresses including packing, deployment, ocean exposure and retrieval. Testing is expected to take place at the University’s Aaron Friedman Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory, which has tanks that can simulate waves, currents and other marine conditions.
The effort also comes as the US seeks to expand and strengthen domestic nuclear-fuel supply and reduce reliance on foreign uranium, the outlet notes. SuperCritical is pursuing participation in the US nuclear-fuel supply chain through its nearshore development program for uranium extraction from seawater, where oceans contain an estimated 4.5 billion metric tons of dissolved uranium.