nuclear-news

Extracting uranium from oceans: very worrying questions arise

Extracting Uranium from oceans offers a mixed bag of possibilities Examiner, AUGUST 22, 2012 BY: DAVID HERRON Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) yesterday announced a new technique for efficiently harvesting uranium from the ocean. This raises the possibility that Uranium supplies will be much deeper and longer lasting than previously thought.

For the environmentally minded it raises a quandary…. there are radiation risks galore…. there is the huge spectre of more nuclear accidents and radiation exposure…..

It would appear this material could be used to target other materials. For example there are concerns over supplies of lithium, or of rare earth metals, or various other minerals, some of which are present in ocean water. Could this material be tailored to target extraction of
those materials from the ocean, providing a source of raw materials that is independent of digging rocks out of the ground? If so it could reduce the amount of hard rock mining operations around the world.

Maybe the material could be used in environmental mitigation, in that there are sites poisoned by releases of toxic metals into the ocean.

But what if corporations so efficiently mine the oceans certain metals that it actually affects the chemical balance of the ocean? The existing chemical balance in the ocean is vital to the food chain, and changing that balance would clearly have some effect on the living things in the ocean. Do “we” even have a clue about the potential impact?…

August 24, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, oceans, technology