Sparton Produces First Yellowcake from Chinese Coal Ash

This one caught me by surprise, but I am not familiar with uranium extraction techniques.

LINK

Sparton Resources announced that it had successfully produced a small quantity of yellowcake (U3O8) from fly ash from a Chinese coal-fired power plant.

The uranium extraction test work is being conducted by Sparton's processing engineering consulting firm Lyntek Inc of Denver, Colorado, USA. The test to produce yellowcake used 6.1 kg of mixed fly ash produced at the Xiaolongtang power plant. The ash averaged some 0.4 pounds of U308 per tonne of ash (160 parts per million uranium).

Is this amount significant?

Are there any benefits from this extraction? Any potential threats from being able to gather this from coal ash?

Is this amount significant?

I am shocked! Yes, it is significant and more. According to your article there may be more than 2000 tons in just the ash that this single plant produced and reclaimed.

Are there any benefits from this extraction?

It can be enriched and used for nuclear reactor fuel, or highly enriched it can be used for nuclear weapons.

Any potential threats from being able to gather this from coal ash?

No more of a threat than any other source of yellow cake. You need Uranium Enrichment equipment of some kind, billions of dollars, and many scientists to produce weapons grade material. Alone yellow cake is toxic and mildly radioactive. Even as a dirty bomb it is a pathetic weapon. America used over 300 tons of Depleted Uranium in the recent Iraq War.

It becomes a problem when its ingested or inhaled. Outside the body the few neutrons emitted are not enough to cause serious damage unless you were covered with dust for a long period, and the Energetic electrons emitted are blocked by the skin.

[edit on 16-10-2007 by Malichai]

reply to post by Malichai


Thanks for the info

I did a little more digging and found the press release from Sparton which gives more info on their project.

www.marketwire.com

...The production of yellowcake from waste coal ash is another milestone in Sparton's ongoing secondary source uranium recovery programs in China and elsewhere. The Company and its process engineering consultants have demonstrated that U3O8 can be produced from this material. Refinement of the process methodologies for extraction will be a priority activity for future work. Elsewhere waste ash sampling programs are underway in Hungary and southern Africa, and new results will be reported as they become available...

Another thing I found amazing is how quickly results came since this idea of claiming uranium form coal ash was proposed in an agreement in January 2007.

It also states :

www.world-nuclear-news.org

The company said that "if amenable to economic uranium extraction methods [this] could develop into a significant supply of uranium for China's developing nuclear power program."

[edit on 2007/10/17 by JacKatMtn]

Does the production of this yellowcake from coal fired plants reduce the traceability of nuclear materials used in in weapons?

Hmm, let me try and reword this. Does the production of this material, and subsequent enrichment into weapons grade materials, reduce the traceability of a nuclear weapon, if it were used?

I hope that made more sense.

On the plus side-isn't this a potential gateway for VERY cheap energy?

reply to post by InSpiteOf


In order to enrich Uranium it must be converted into a gas compound. Uranium Hexa-flouride is the only thing used, but others are possible.

This breaks it down into individual molecules. After enrichment the flourine is stripped off leaving virtually pure Uranium at a specific enrichment level.

Understanding enrichment is simple enough. Natural Uranium is composed mostly of the isotope U238. A small percentage, usually less tha 1 percent, is the isotope U235. It is the U235 that is wanted for both weapons and for fuel. The heavier U238 is stripped of with an ionic beam, filter difusion, or centrifuge separation.

What you get after enrichment is the same, other than the level of enrichment, no matter what method is used.

If you think that there is a way to test where it is from you must have seen that Movie, which is fiction.

Uranium is Uranium is Uranium no matter your nation, race, religion, planet, star system, or galaxy.

[edit on 17-10-2007 by Malichai]

reply to post by uberarcanist


I couldn't tell you if its cheaper than mining natural Uranium, but just removing it from the waste gives great 'green' value.

Like the oil, at some point the supply of Uranium will fall below demand. Unless of course we blow ourselves to hell first. This can supplement the supply.

reply to post by Malichai


This much I do know (I guess I may track down the actual numbers soon) coal is plentiful, uranium is not. Nuclear power plants, however, do not need large amounts of uranium to produce electricity. Without doing any math, it sounds good, but I got a paper to write and I should do that before crunching any numbers.

My admittedly amatuer opinion is that this isn't a big deal, but isn't boring stuff either.

It does provide the benefits of not having to locate, possess, or operate a suitable mine. It seems possible that this could end up having both economic and time-efficiency benefits for people who for some reason want uranium.

But it doesn't exactly mean there will be a red tag sale on nuclear weapons at your neighborhood coal plant either.

First of all, you've got to have a coal fired plant and the add-on equipment to capture and process the ash- which rules out any threat from your Jose Padilla types.

Then even if you get the yellow cake, it might as well be devilsfood with strawberries unless you can convert it to UF6, which rules out most non-state entities.

Then you've got to enrich that gas- which, incidentally, can kill you if you're trying to improvise- which is not to say that a smart guy with the right resources couldn't do it if he had a lot of patience and people willing to die working for him, but it does mean that its mainly a job for pros.

Enriching it is a time intensive process and usually requires sophisticated equipment (you could theoretically make it a little less technical using inefficient and outdated technologies, but it would be even more labor and time intensive.

And even if you do that and get your U235 out of it and go to make a bomb, even most states wouldn't have the expertise to immediately crank out a high yield device, or even a very respectable low yield one that could be delivered very effectively. If you're an amatuer or a terrorist, before you even get that far you have to bone up on your math and physics so that you don't make a dud (or worse, make critical mass, killing yourself and ruining any chance of getting the cleaning deposit back for your rented workspace).

So I wouldn't be afraid, but I am interested.

reply to post by The Vagabond


You don't think the potential of very cheap and clean power is a big deal?

reply to post by uberarcanist


I suspect he was refering to the proliferation potential. Yellow cake itself is no terrorist, or rogue state threat. The enrichment facility that Iran is now operating just reached the point where it could produce enough Weapons Grade material for a bomb within one or two years. Provided that they redesigned the enrichemnt cascades for producing highly enriched Uranium. The present layout does not allow for this unless backfeeding is used which would increase the time at least five fold.

And, of course, they would have to kick out the inspectors before doing any of that.

I don't think anyone, other than the illuminati, has the capability to produce enough Weapons Grade material. This is a job for a nation with billions to spare.

As for benifits in the energy sector, yes its a good thing. But it takes a lot more yellowcake than you migh imagine to produce reactor fuel. If this was the amount over its entire life it is significant, but not a replacement for Uranium mines.

What disturbs me is the though of all this Uranium from coal plants flying around in the air, getting into the water and the food.

Malichai is correct as to my meaning, although when you get right down to it, unless you know of some way to make the internal combustion engine run on UF6, I wouldn't say that this is more exciting that the ongoing research on fusion.

It's nice that there's a new and interesting and potentially very beneficial new source of fission fuel, but the fact that you have to build a nuclear reactor to use said fuel sort of takes the "holy crap" factor away.

If we found a magic uranium tree that bears tens of tons of 90% enriched U-235 as its fruit, and all of our reactor fuel problems were solved effective tomorrow, it'd still take decades to build enough plants to solve our energy problems.

Just toss it in the "miracles for 2025" pile and I'll look at it when I'm done figuring out what I'll cut out of my budget when oil crosses $100/bbl.

And forgive me for being contrary, but I don't consider an energy source to be clean if the safest use of the waste products that anyone can seem to come up with is to launch them out of tank cannons at our enemies.

Burning hydrogen is clean- you can (and should) bathe in the waste product with no ill effects.
Invent a fission reactor where I can safely bathe in the waste products, and so help me god I will personally steal Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize and deliver it to you.

reply to post by Malichai


First, thanks for that quick lesson on enrichment, it was very informative!

Second, I dont know which movie your talking about, tbh, i read somewhere on ATS a while ago that after a detonation, there was a way to tell where the material was enriched. I guess this is wrong so thanks for the clarification.

I suspect that you actually can trace a weapon if you know enough about the source's mines, refineries, reactors, reprocessing centers, and weapons designs. If you can't specifically trace it, you can still definately do a little detective work to get general results.

Lets step away from nukes for a second to look at another metal craft- Damascus steel. The crusaders found Muslim weaponry to be superior. As it turns out, the Muslims were getting at Iron deposits from India that contained more Tungsten than other sources, and were forging it in a way that created carbon microtubules within the steel.

The iron pillar of Delhi is another example- the iron has unique characteristics because of the refining process. The iron ore was reduced with charcoal instead of limestone which left a higher phosphorus content and catalyzed a different oxidation than normal iron, so the pillar does not appear to rust.

Getting back to nuclear fuel, the mining and refining of fuel or material for breeding could concievably leave tell-tale impurities.

The type of fuel will in some cases dictate the kind of reactor it was produced in, and not all countries use all types of reactor.

The type and effeciency of a reactor, in combination with the efficiency of reprocessing, could create distinctive ratios of certain elements.

The efficiency of a weapon and its fallout products can indicate the design of the weapon.