Scientists Find Cheap And Easy Way To Extract Lithium From Seawater | OilPrice.com Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology developed what they believe is an economically viable system to extract high-purity lithium from seawater. and According to the researchers, the cell will probably need $5 of electricity to extract 1 kilogram of lithium from seawater. This means that the value of hydrogen and chlorine produced by the cell would end up offsetting the cost of power, and residual seawater could also be used in desalination plants to provide fresh water. Posted as this could be disruptive tech coming down the road...
Consider the rare earth elements needed to catalyze the reactions. 5 bux per kilo is reflective of only part of the costs. All the same, I'm enthusiastic about the prospects. (Note that the King Abdullah Univ has a large proportion of expat Chinese on staff.)
With other battery tech in the rise, and some looking to be vastly better then Lithium in any form, I expect to see a near quantum shift toward sustainable electric power for almost everything! Graphite seems to hold much promise, as it's much more neutral both in construction, charging, and recycling, cutting one of the biggest expenses from the cycle! Gonna be interesting to watch it unfold! I'm already experimenting with Graphine batteries, and have found the power density to be vastly greater then any other battery currently available, so much so that I'm switching my aircraft over to these batteries, and major bonus is they are completely safe, no fire or explosions, and no parisitic drain across cells, nor a need to balance charge them to ensure equal cell charge rates!
^^^^ I find this very interesting. I will have to do some reading, thanks! Would sure be nice to use something besides lithium in my dive lights. DW
Hydrogen isn't that valuable. Using $5 of electricity is only about 50kwh. If I remember correctly if the electrolysis was 100% efficient you would get 1kg of hydrogen per 40kwh of electricity.
Yeah but if US Mag or Dead Sea Mag uses that process to get the lithium from their processes that will be tons of extra $ with little added cost. Great salt lake and the dead sea both have decent lithium content. Dealing with elemental lithium is a serious pain in the butt.
I remember when cold fusion was announced by researchers and it was herald as the next cheap power source. However it never panned out and the researchers were discredited. This lithium extract I will hold off judgment until it is proven
You could tell cold fusion was fake due to the lack of high energy neutrons. I could smell bullshit when people were standing around unshielded reactor and not dieing.
What about Salt Reactors???? I heard a bunch about that some years ago, seems like Salt Water could generate electricity under the right conditions! Or was that another bunch of Bullsnot?
Molten salt has been proposed for reactor cooling (i.e., heat transfer from the reactor to another heat exchanger of some kind. So far as I know, the studies ended at the pilot plant level if not sooner. Heard nothing on it for years.
Oh they are real. They use a consumable anode made out of aluminum. Obviously it takes more energy to make the aluminum than you get out of the battery.
Pr Prototype plant is being developed. It’s scalable and safe (can’t have a meltdown). It can use thorium, plutonium or waste uranium from a conventional reactor as fuel. The waste from a molten salt reactor has a much shorter half life when compared to that from a conventional reactor. These reactors will be much simpler to operate as well as much less dangerous and should be much less expensive to build. We have the fuel availability here in the US to provide 100% of our electric needs for many hundreds of years. Just one thorium mine deposit in Idaho has enough ore to supply all of the country’s electricity needs for several hundred years. The problem is caused by the reluctance of those chosen few who control all of the present conventional fuel sources and those politicians they own. They don’t want to give up their monopoly on wealth and power.
Oh and there's something like an 800 year supply of depleted uranium sitting above ground in Idaho courtesy of the nuclear arms race. By the time we burn up that along with 4x as much thorium, then nuclear fission might be ready.
Depleted uranium is by definition very short of fissile materials. Those materials were removed to use in bombs and power plants, thus won't work in a reactor. Reactive? No. Toxic? Yes, heavy metal.
Depleted uranium like thorium can be used it just takes more expensive to build and operate breeder reactors. Breeder reactor cores are usually filled with heavy water. It appears to take a long time to breed thorium into uranium 233 which is very fissile. Same thing with depleted uranium, it's easier and faster to enrich what's already in the natural uranium. Only nations like the US, russia, france, china maybe Germany can produce a useable amount of heavy water for such a thing. Breeder reactors get a bad wrap for being associated with making weapons grade plutonium and nuclear weapons proliferation.
The type reactor that is being developed is not a conventional breeder reactor. It uses molten salts and operates at lower temperatures. It is a simpler design and does not have the capability for a melt down. In theory current stockpiles of spent uranium can be used for fuel in a molten salt reactor and the process leaves a waste product with a much shorter half life. Look up molten salt reactors for a better description of the potentials for this type reactor design.