SuperCritical Materials licenses technology for uranium seawater extraction

Last week, Austin, Texas-based nuclear fuel start-up SuperCritical Materials announced that it has secured a license from the Department of Energy for a patented uranium and critical materials adsorbent manufacturing process originally developed by a team led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

SuperCritical aims to use this license to extract uranium from seawater at an industrial scale in the United States and abroad.

The background: The world's oceans contain roughly 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium, which is more than 1,000 times the identified terrestrial reserves. That uranium is also constantly replenished, mainly via river flow. This massive, untapped supply of potential fuel presents an obvious opportunity for the commercial nuclear sector if that supply can be harvested economically.

As such, the United States, Japan, and China have developed a multitude of research projects on various methods to extract uranium from seawater in past decades. However, the technology has never been deployed commercially.

SuperCritical seeks to change that by leveraging research begun more than a decade ago at PNNL. That project reached a significant milestone in 2018 when PNNL announced that it had created five grams of yellowcake uranium concentrate (U3O8) using acrylic fibers that had extracted the element from seawater.

At the time, Gary Gill, then a PNNL researcher, said that this milestone indicated "that this approach can eventually provide commercially attractive nuclear fuel derived from the oceans-the largest source of uranium on earth."

In that press release, PNNL explained that this milestone had been achieved in collaboration with a private company called LCW Supercritical Technologies. LCW, which was backed by federal funding through the Small Business Innovation Research program, was in the process of licensing the extraction technology, assumedly for scaled-up, commercial use.

The exact business details of the handoff from LCW Supercritical Technologies to SuperCritical Materials is not presently clear; it is conceivable that the latter is a renaming of the former, or that the slight name change is the result of a merger or acquisition. On its website, SuperCritical Materials states that it was founded in 2024.

It is nonetheless clear that SuperCritical Materials builds directly on the work of PNNL and LCW. Gary Gill is on the advisory board of SuperCritical Materials, and Chien Wai (who was previously the president of LCW) is on the company's technical team-among other links between the two groups' staffs.

Today's update: In its recent press release, SuperCritical announced that the DOE has granted it a license to commercialize this technology and "rights to the manufacturing process and to deploy the technology at industrial scale in the United States initially and subsequently in allied nations seeking to strengthen domestic nuclear fuel security."

PNNL described the adsorbent material SuperCritical is working to commercialize as a durable, reusable, "wavy looking polymer adsorbent that can be deployed in a marine environment." That polymer adsorbs uranium onto molecules that are chemically bound to acrylic fibers. Wai further stated that the material to make these fibers was inexpensive and could even be created from waste yarn.

SuperCritical is yet to announce its timeline to commercial deployment of this technology, its current production capacity, or plans for how the fibers will be deployed at sea.