Re: Global heating and stupid greens

["Bjorn Cedervall" <bcradsafers@hotmail.com>]

>Does anyone know if the Japanese work on extracting U from seawater is 
>still active? and the current cost estimate of such recovery?  I thought it 
>had been only about 10 times mined U prices back before the prices dropped.
---
I had a detailed discussion about this with a Swedish professor (T. 
Westermark) in nuclear chemistry around 1982. I have a faint memory that he 
mentioned a few Swedish scientists who had tried U extraction on the Swedish 
west coast and in principle the technique worked but not to be economically 
feasible - the data were encouraging however. Several factors came up - the 
first was local depletion (which would be relevant for that Swedish site - 
but not for a sea location with stronger water currents and better 
turnover). Then higher temperature was on the positive side. It was 
therefore mentioned that the coast southeast of South Africa would be a 
better place (perhaps some Radsafer could comment this with better 
information). Perhaps Japan is an analogous place - I have no idea. Another 
aspect that was pointed out was that to make the technique profitable one 
could at the same time also extract other valuable metals (perhaps some 30 % 
value could be added this way). I may still have notes from that talk but 
they are mot around at this moment of writing. I just remember that may 
bottom line was something like "hmm... this seems like it may work and 
cannot be ruled out".

Bjorn Cedervall   bcradsafers@hotmail.com
http://www.geocities.com/bjorn_cedervall/

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