Re:Turning desalination waste into a useful resource
by credit_guy on Sunday January 24, 2021 @03:27PM
(#25895579)
Nice 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.
Re:Turning desalination waste into a useful resource
by vilhelm_s on Sunday January 24, 2021 @03:28PM
(#25895583)
I 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/).
Re:Turning desalination waste into a useful resource
by 08-15 on Sunday January 24, 2021 @03:45PM
(#25895781)
What part of "this assumes a breeder reactor" did you not understand?
Re:Turning desalination waste into a useful resource
by vilhelm_s on Sunday January 24, 2021 @06:46PM
(#25897420)
Oh I missed that!
Re:Turning desalination waste into a useful resource
by wolfhumble on Sunday January 24, 2021 @04:57PM
(#25896566)
So 4kWh/t is used to desalinate 2 tons of seawater that turn into 1 ton of freshwater and 1 ton of brine?
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.