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Energy consumption of reverse osmosis is about 4kWh/t. The byproduct is a ton of brine. Sea water contains about 3ppb Uranium, so our brine contains 6mg of U
by 08-15 6y ago
Energy consumption of reverse osmosis is about 4kWh/t. The byproduct is a ton of brine. Sea water contains about 3ppb Uranium, so our brine contains 6mg of U per ton of fresh water produced.
A 1GW nuclear power station consumes about 1t of U per year and produces about 8000GWh of electricity in that time. So we need about 1mg/8kWh. We got 12 times that much.
So, it sort of works out. Of course, this assumes a breeder reactor and I pretended that brine is purified uranium. If breeders are commercialized, it might be worth looking into this. Right now, it isn't.
- enkid 6y agoAwesome, thanks!
- credit_guy 6y agoNice analysis. But the premise of the discussion here is that people do the desalination for its own sake, not in order to harvest Uranium. This [1] article from 2012. It presents a Uranium extraction method from seawater that would put the extraction cost at $300/kg. Nowadays the market price is about $70/kg. However, if method were to be applied to brine instead of regular seawater, maybe the cost would go down. Hard to see it going down by a factor of 5 though. [1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/ferguson2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/ferguson2/
- vilhelm_s 6y agoI think you overestimate the energy in uranium. 8000GWh per tonne and year would be 28.8 TJ/kg, while the numbers I have seen is more like 0.7 TJ/kg (http://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/ http://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/).
- wolfhumble 6y agoSo 4kWh/t is used to desalinate 2 tons of seawater that turn into 1 ton of freshwater and 1 ton of brine?