DISQUS

Brock · 1 year ago

Um, I don't think Japan consumes ~487 million tons of Uranium per year. That number would seem off by an order of magnitude even if the units were pounds. According to Wikipedia, total worldwide production of uranium in 2003 was only 41,429 tonnes, so we're talking much smaller numbers here. I see that you're just quoting the Japanese source material, but the number doesn't seem credible. 40% of Japanese consumption would be about 3,480 tons, I think. Translation error?
nextbigfuture · 1 year ago

There are no non-japanese sources on this report. 40% of total worldwide production comes out near to 19,500 tons which would be similar to the digits referred. I think the 195 million tons is the expected recoverable resource. and the 40% is the annual production based on the scale of the project. Using polymers, the total amount of uranium recovered from three collection boxes containing 350 kg of fabric was >1 kg of yellowcake after 240 days of submersion in the ocean. So 65 million tons of seaweed might get 195,000 tons of uranium based on a comparable efficiency.

abstract of the polymer recovery work.