Scientists in China create a predator-like material to hunt for uranium in the ocean

An international research team in China has developed a microscopic “predator-like” material capable of swimming through water and hunting uranium ions, a breakthrough that could open new possibilities for nuclear fuel extraction and cleaning up radioactive pollution.The light-powered material, a metal-organic framework (MOF) micromotor created by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Qinghai Institute of Salt Lakes, can autonomously move through water while capturing uranium ions. The work was accepted on March 24 by the peer-reviewed journal Nano Research.Uranium is the fuel that powers nuclear reactors. Although seawater contains an estimated 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium, it has an extremely low concentration, making extraction both technically difficult and prohibitively expensive.