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“Concentrations are tiny, on the order of a single grain of salt dissolved in a liter of water,” said Yi Cui, a materials scientist and co-author of a paper in Nature Energy. “But the oceans are so vast that if we can extract these trace amounts cost effectively, the supply would be endless.” That's a lot more uranium than I would have guessed. According to the top few google results, it's about 3 milligrams per cubi…
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As others have pointed out here, no, I was not off. It's a bit of a shocker to realize how much U is out there. There's a reason one should test your basement for radon before you buy a house.
But, since people don't mine uranium randomly, one may assume that your back yard doesn't have enough to be price-competitive with modern mines.
Fun fact: if the uranium and thorium in an average crustal rock were totally fissioned (using breeder reactors), the rock would produce about 20x the heat energy of burning the same mass of coal.
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I don't think the idea is that it's meant to be competitive against extraction on land. What it does do is expand the potential uranium supply to make nuclear power viable as a global power supply on the order of hundreds of thousands of years at least.
It also gives a path to nuclear power and weapons for counties with no uranium deposits.
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It also gives a path to nuclear power and weapons for counties with no uranium deposits.
Is obtaining the uranium really the bottleneck?
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According to [1], "the normal concentration of uranium in soil is 300 μg/kg to 11.7 mg/kg." According to [2], the density of topsoil ranges from 1,100 to 2,500 kg/m^3. One acre is about 4,000 m^2, so a conservative estimate is that there is about 1.3 kg of uranium in 1 meter of top soil on a 1 acre lot. (4000 m^3 * 1100 kg/m^3 * 3x10^-7). That's just the low end - taking the midway point for both yields over 40kg (40…
on a 1 acre lot Not many of us have all of an acre lot for our homes.
10^9 == many of us. Unless your definition of "us" is hacker news readers.