Amidoxime - Harvesting Uranium Dications from Seawater - Dr. Stephen Boyd @ TEAC12
Dr. Stephen Boyd white-boards how Amidoxime can be used to harvest Uranium from sea water.
There are billions of metric tons of uranium dissolved in all of the oceans on Earth.
But seawater uranium is diffuse.
We need an ultra-low energy way to scoop up the uranium.
Remember, it's the electronic structure that makes up the covalent bonding.
That's why this has been such an intense field of study for 25 years.
Because scientists need to understand how this fits in there, and whether or not there's any exchange, electronic exchange, chemical exchange, spin exchange, any kind of exchange between the caging atoms and the thing that is being caged.
Is this polymer, is it an expensive thing to make?
No, it's cheap.
This can go millions of units in either direction.
Because at the end of the day, what are Japanese planning on doing?
Hanging these nets off of trawling ships or boats in the Pacific Ocean. Kilometers long.
Because a kilometer can gather a hell of a lot of Uranium.
Exactly one of these can fit into exactly one of these.
It's a molar ratio. It's a 1:1 ratio.
If I know precisely down to the gram how many kilometers of amidoxine I'm dragging off the back of my boat, scientists have already measured how fast this process occurs. I'm going to know how long to hang my net off a boat to grab a precise number of UO2 2+.
Are there any competitors? To fit in there?
Almost certainly not. Here's why.
This is kind of special.
I know for a fact that all the salt that's dissolved in there, magnesium 2+, lithium 1+. They are spheres.
This is a sphere of distributed charge.
Calcium 2+, also in seawater, right?
Let's talk about the anions now. What are the anions?
What are the negatively charged things that are in there?
Well, there's bromine 1-, also a sphere. Chloride anion, also a sphere.
Would spheres fit into something like this? No.
Look at the size of this sucker. You've got 1, 2, 3, 4. I know how long these bonds are.
They're in roughly 1 to 1.8 angstrom, maybe 1.9 angstrom distance.
And this is a triple bond, so it's shorter. It's more contracted.
This is SP2 hybridized, but this is a single bond.
This is here. A little bit longer.
So I know what this cage looks like.
And part of this cage is actually stable.
These triple bonds aren't letting rotation or libration to occur.
This is librating like a son of a bitch. This is moving, right?
10 to the 4 times per second. (10,000 /second.) This is spinning.
There's your shape, this funny looking with the oxygen hook.
That's a really important part, by the way.
And there's the size.
We've got 1, 2, 3, 4 atoms that are directly involved in the capture of the UO2 dicat ion.
Is this a polymer that can be extruded like plastic?
Yeah.
Like I said, kilometers long, dude.
But instead of fish, you're grabbing Uranium.
So they bring the net back to shore and it goes to a processing plant...
Because of the facility of the nitrogen, perhaps more importantly, the nitrogen and then the oxygen to a lesser extent, I can change these chemistries very easily.
Because they readily accept and shed protons depending on the overall pH.
I don't need a pH of 1. I need a pH of like 6 to protonate this.
That's not a big deal. That's less acidic than lemon juice.
There's way more uranium in our oceans than there is on land.
And you don't need a bulldozer. You need a net.
So that's the attraction of ocean-bearing uranium di-cat-ions.
So in your humble opinion, would you say that uranium is a renewable resource?
Absolutely. 100%. It's on my Twitter feed.
Nuclear is renewable energy. Nuclear is renewable energy.
There's enough of this stuff in the oceans to power us for the next 100,000 years without burning another gram of fossil fuels. It's that simple.
It's super simple.