探索海水提铀

Getting Uranium From the Sea

如果海水提铀技术能够大规模推广,人类再也不用为铀资源稀缺而担忧了。浩瀚的大海，除了为我们提供海鲜、食盐等产品之外，还能为我们提供什么？核电科学家告诉我们，它还能提供一种名为铀的物质。铀，为一种银白色金属，是重要的天然放射性元素。人们熟知它，是因为它成为了目前最重要的核燃料。而平时我们常说的天然铀，指的是天然存在于自然界中的铀。目前，全球核电站所使用的核燃料基本来源于对陆地上天然铀矿的开采。

Ocean, the origin of life, provides us food, water, material.What else it can give us? The answer is uranium.Uranium is a silvery-white metallic chemical element in the actinide series of the periodic table, withsymbol U and atomic number 92.An additional 4.6 billion tonnes of uranium are estimated to be in sea water (Japanese scientists in the 1980s showed that extraction of uranium from sea water using ion exchangers was technically feasible). There have been experiments to extract uranium from sea water, but the yield has been low due to the carbonate present in the water. In 2012, ORNL researchers announced the successful development of a new absorbent material dubbed HiCap, which vastly outperforms previous best adsorbents, which perform surface retention of solid or gas molecules, atoms or ions.If we can successfully getting uranium from sea. We never need to worry about the shortage of uranium.