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Bipolar electrochemical uranium extraction from seawater with ultra-low cell voltage

Nature Sustainability volume 8, pages 682–691 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Efficient uranium extraction from seawater has the potential to secure an abundant and reliable supply of nuclear fuel, providing affordable energy with minimized carbon emissions. Among the many extraction methods, the electrochemical route has emerged as a promising choice owing to its fast kinetics and materials regeneration. The major challenges facing this technology, however, lie in its high energy consumption, low extraction efficiency and poor selectivity. Here we show a bipolar electrochemical uranium extraction (EUE) system that combines cathodic direct electroreduction of uranium species and electrochemistry-assisted indirect uranium reduction at the anode. The EUE device operates at an ultra-low voltage of merely 0.6 V, exhibiting an efficiency of ~100% for sources with a wide range of uranium concentrations (1–100 ppm). This bipolar EUE system in natural seawater displays excellent uranium selectivity (above 85.3%), long-term stability (45 cycles), low energy consumption (1,944 kWh kg−1 U) and cost advantage (US$83.2 kg−1 U). This work opens an avenue to the electrochemical system design for sustainable recycling of different waste resources.

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Fig. 1: A schematic illustration of the conventional and bipolar EUE methods.
Fig. 2: Electrochemical uranium extraction with a bipolar system.
Fig. 3: The reaction mechanism at both the anode and the cathode.
Fig. 4: Bipolar EUE system process and its performance.
Fig. 5: The uranium extraction performance in different solutions.
Fig. 6: The uranium extraction performance in seawater.

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All data are available within the Article and its Supplementary Information. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2021YFA1500900 to S.W.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 22425021 to S.W. and 22272047 and 21905088 to Yanyong W.), the Provincial Natural Science Foundation of Hunan (grant no. 2022JJ10006 to Yanyong W.) and Hunan Provincial Innovation Foundation for Postgraduate (grant no. CX20240455 to Yanjing W.).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Yanjing Wang, Guobin Wen, Zhijuan Liu, Ta Thi Thuy Nga, Chung-Li Dong.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Chemo and Biosensing, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Advanced Catalytic Engineering Research Center of the Ministry of Education, Hunan University, Changsha, China

    Yanjing Wang, Guobin Wen, Jie You, Shiqian Du, Fei Zhang, Qie Liu, Jianrong Wei, Yu Cao, Yahong Yuan, Yanyong Wang & Shuangyin Wang

  2. Henan Key Laboratory of Crystalline Molecular Functional Materials, Green Catalysis Center, and College of Chemistry, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China

    Zhijuan Liu

  3. Department of Physics, Tamkang University, New Taipei City, Taiwan

    Ta Thi Thuy Nga & Chung-Li Dong

  4. College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China

    Chao Xie & Xinda Peng

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  1. Yanjing Wang
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Contributions

S.W. and Yanyong W. proposed the research direction and guided the project. Yanyong W. proposed the design concept of the system. Yanjing W. conceived the research and performed experiments. S.W., Yanyong W. and Yanjing W. co-wrote the paper with input from all authors. G.W. helped with the cell device design. C.-L.D. and T.T.T.N. carried out the in situ XAFS test. Z.L., J.Y., C.X., S.D., F.Z., Y.C., J.W., Q.L., X.P. and Y.Y. provided suggestions on the experimental results and discussion.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yanyong Wang or Shuangyin Wang.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Hui Wu, Wenkun Zhu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–45, Tables 1–23 and Movie 1.

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Supplementary Video 1

Video of a small-scale seawater trial in 100 l natural seawater using the bipolar EUE electrolyser stack.

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Source Data Fig. 2

Unprocessed western blots.

Source Data Fig. 3

Unprocessed western blots.

Source Data Fig. 4

Unprocessed western blots.

Source Data Fig. 5

Unprocessed western blots.

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Unprocessed western blots.

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Wang, Y., Wen, G., Liu, Z. et al. Bipolar electrochemical uranium extraction from seawater with ultra-low cell voltage. Nat Sustain 8, 682–691 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01567-z

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