Chinese scientists have developed a new material – inspired by the fractal networks of blood vessels – that they say can extract 20 times more uranium from seawater than other approaches.

In a paper published in Nature Sustainability, the scientists said the oceans offer a virtually infinite source of uranium and could sustain nuclear power technology in terms of fuel supply. However, the current processes to extract uranium from seawater remain neither economically viable nor efficient enough to compete with uranium ore mining.