Electrochemical Molecular Switches for the Capture and Release of Uranium.

[NNadir]

3. To run the system electrochemically, any polymer would need to be conducting.

These are known, of course, but not really commercial.

I'm not sure that I would consider linking this type of system to a polymer. It is of course - one sees more and more of this particularly in molecular biology based therapeutics, ADC's and the like - possible to imagine a linker, perhaps bound to one of the phenyl groups of the phosphine, and if the linker is conjugated, well maybe. This may or may not address the issue of insolubility in water, I can't say.

Another option however is utilizing filtration type systems by attaching the system to a porous material.

Two summers ago, in his first internship in France, my son worked in an area about which I'd never heard, polymer derived ceramics. These can be utilized to produce porous structures rather like the glass frits that are found in organic laboratories, in things like Buchners, Schlenk tubes and the like.

Also, there is increasingly a lot of work being done on a type of ceramic popularized and developed by Michel Barsoum at Drexel, the so called MAX phases, which are machinable, exhibit some flexibility, are highly ordered, and electrically conducting.

This is a wild speculation on my part, but the advantage of polymer derived ceramic systems as I understand them is that they can be constructed so as to exhibit porosity. MAXenes are two dimensional monolayer carbides or nitrides that exhibit conductivity.

Perhaps in nanostructuring systems, exploiting all these technologies in a synergistic way, we could go somewhere with this interesting technology.

We have plenty of time to do it, because as noted in the OP, the amount of uranium already refined represents an enormous reserve of energy, as does the thorium partially refined by the removal of the lanthanides in the native ores.

I doubt that on this planet we are smart enough to get it, because we're all wrapped up in emotional mysticism, fondness for ignorance, and driven by fear, but we need not obtain any more uranium in order to save the world. We certainly have enough plutonium to set up the spark plug for the system.

It would simply be a matter of us coming to our senses, something that is, admittedly, a long shot. My feeling is that we'll just keep building wind turbines until we reach 500 ppm, still claiming, in exercises of pure idiocy, that nuclear power is "too dangerous" and acting as if climate change and air pollution are not "too dangerous."