Four billion metric tons of uranium sit dissolved in the world’s oceans right now, roughly 1,000 times the total identified in hard-rock mines worldwide. A US startup called Fluxnium just emerged from stealth with a plan to get at it, backed by $7 million in seed funding and chemistry licensed from the US Department of Energy.
The catch: extracting that uranium currently costs more than twice the market rate, and no one has proven it works at commercial scale.
The timing matters. Yellowcake prices have risen approximately 75% over the past five years, according to US Energy Information Administration data. US policy discussions target tripling nuclear capacity by 2050, yet the country imports the overwhelming majority of its uranium from a short list of geopolitically exposed nations.
Yeah, let’s take my condo, for example. I have a 2 bedroom with a big inteconnected dining/kitchen/living area. There are only doors to the bedrooms or the bathroom. With no way to subdivide the living areas, the bedrooms are the only practical place to hidey-hole in the winter.
So let’s see the problems there:
Frozen pipes. The rule of the condo (not guideline, rule) is thermostats are set no lower than 55 degrees F. Now pipes freeze at 32, so that is a pretty outrageous amount of manadatory wiggle room --23 degrees. I honestly don’t know enough about plumbing or insulation to suggest a fix, but I will note that there is no plumbing inside my ground floor apartment that touches an outside wall, so I bet I could get pretty darn close to 32 in any room without bursting pipes, but I do so at a pretty high risk.
So I’m hiding in the bedroom, the only room with a door. Why is the space taken up by a frame, boxspring, and matress that is used for only 8 hours a day, and why is everyone sleeping in fucking full size mattresses instead of a twin if they live alone? Honestly, I never understood it.
Japanese solution is a roll up mattress; the western solution is the much more complicated and expesnive and permanent murphy bed. I think any homeowner can replace their full size matress with a twin, or a bed with a roll-up mattress, or a bed with a futon, so that’s pretty easy.