Uranium dissolved in the ocean can already be captured in the lab — now it has to survive the open sea

SuperCritical Materials and the University of Michigan have started a five-phase program to test whether seawater uranium capture equipment can withstand repeated cycles of use at industrial scale.

SuperCritical Materials Corp and the University of Michigan announced on September 23, 2026 a research partnership to advance the mechanical design, prototyping and testing of uranium recovery systems for offshore use. SuperCritical holds an exclusive license to a patented adsorbent material technology that captures dissolved uranium as seawater flows over its surface — the process has three steps: deploy the adsorbent at sea, leave it exposed for a set period to capture uranium, and retrieve it for processing and metal extraction. The research program has five phases: detailed mechanical characterization of the adsorbent; evaluation of different packing configurations for the material; design and fabrication of deployment and retrieval prototypes; hydrodynamic testing of multiple versions of these prototypes; and refinement of the system for future offshore pilot projects. Tests will be carried out at the University of Michigan's Aaron Friedman Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory, equipped with towing and wave tanks that simulate real marine conditions. No completion date or investment amount was disclosed.

The idea of extracting uranium from seawater is not new — labs such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States have shown since the 2010s that amidoxime-based polymer fibers can capture dissolved uranium in small-scale tests. What has held this kind of technology back for decades was never proving that the chemistry works — it is making the equipment survive the ocean. The uranium concentration in seawater is extremely low, around 3.3 parts per billion, which means that to capture a meaningful amount of the metal, a huge area of adsorbent must be exposed to an equally huge volume of water, for long periods, under wave, current and biofouling conditions that no lab tank truly reproduces. That shift in focus — from a chemistry problem to a mechanical and naval engineering problem — is what the SuperCritical program with the University of Michigan represents. Instead of trying to further improve the capture rate of the adsorbent itself, the program tests whether the structure that holds, exposes and retrieves that material can withstand repeated cycles of use at industrial scale without degrading, losing efficiency or incurring prohibitive maintenance costs. It is a subtle but decisive difference: an excellent adsorbent in the lab is worth nothing industrially if the system that deploys it at sea deteriorates after a few cycles of use.

The oceans hold an estimated 4.5 billion metric tonnes of dissolved uranium — an amount that dwarfs known economic land-based reserves, today on the order of a few million tonnes, concentrated in a small number of countries such as Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia and Namibia. In an era of growing demand for nuclear power, part of it driven by the energy appetite of artificial intelligence data centers, widening the uranium supply base beyond geographically concentrated land mining is a matter of long-term energy security, not just cost. The caveat is that extracting uranium from seawater still costs several times more than conventional land mining, and this program does not change that cost equation directly — it addresses a necessary but not sufficient precondition for ocean extraction to one day move beyond the research pilot stage and into commercial operation. If mechanical durability at industrial scale is solved, the next hurdle remains the cost per kilogram of recovered uranium compared with land-based alternatives.