In 2011 the DOE put together a team from U.S. national laboratories, universities and research institutes to address the challenges of economically extracting uranium from seawater.

However, extracting uranium from seawater presents a significant challenge. Uranium is present in very low concentrations in the ocean, making it difficult to isolate efficiently.

Scientists in the US have developed an “inexpensive” method to mine lithium from seawater, which they claim could lead to sustainable extraction of a mineral that is itself key to the global ...

Knowing ionic magnesium is the third most abundant element in the ocean, Dow scientists set out to develop a method to extract it from seawater and process it into its pure metallic form. In 1941, the ...

The APS is a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne National Laboratory. “Despite the low concentration of uranium and the presence of many other metals extracted from seawater, we were able ...

Extracting these ions has proven to be challenging, though, as the materials for doing so don’t have enough surface area to trap ions effectively. So, Rui Zhao, Guangshan Zhu and colleagues wanted to ...

Despite these observations, Roskill says that the method of producing lithium phosphate from seawater-derived brine containing 0.9% Li could have other applications.

More information: Yanjing Wang et al, Bipolar electrochemical uranium extraction from seawater with ultra-low cell voltage, Nature Sustainability (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-025-01567-z ...

Lithium extraction from seawater has been an area of potential but has many challenges. There are around 230 billion tonnes of lithium in the world’s seawater, about 16,000 times the reserves of ...

An amidoxime is the chemical group attached to the polymer fiber responsible for binding uranium. Abney and colleagues plan to use this knowledge to design adsorbents that can harness the vast ...