The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences (XMAS 2025)

Nuclear power accounts for 13% of the world's electricity supply without producing greenhouse gases, and will make significant contributions to China's low-carobon objective. And uranium is a key raw material for the nuclear industry, and China is a depleted uranium country, relying on imports for over 90% of natural uranium raw materials. The total amount of uranium in the seawater of ocean is 4.5 billion tons, and it is estimated that the uranium content in the ocean is more than 1000 times that of known land deposits. Due to its low solubility, the concentration of soluble uranium in seawater is only 3.3 ppb. Moreover, coexisting metal ions in seawater, especially vanadium, can significantly compete with uranium, posing challenges for uranium extraction from seawater. In addition, complex marine environments can seriously harm adsorbents and reduce their service life. Therefore, the development of advanced adsorbents for uranium extraction from seawater with high loading capacity, high specificity, fast equilibration time, and high reusability is the goal pursued by scientists. In order to improve the performance of uranium extraction from seawater, new materials have been designed for enriching uranium resources in marine environments. The positive results have been achieved to improve the utilization rate of uranyl coordination sites in seawater, ion selectivity, and the performance of marine antibiofouling. The sufficient exposure of coordination sites, effective design of coordination space structure and functional groups, and effective construction of marine antifouling adsorbents jointly promote the improvement of uranium extraction performance from seawater. Recently, our team has also conducted research on chemical detection technology for marine nuclear pollution elements.
 

marine,chemical separation, uranium extraction from seawater, environmental radiochemistry, nuclide detection