[fluoridation]

The question however, is a) whether what's conceptually possible is actually possible, and b) whether what's possible will become factual before we hit a hard limit. It's small consolation that having a Dyson sphere around the Sun would solve our energy problems if we've already run out of fossil fuels to run our logistics networks, and maybe we should have scaled back on the growth-seeking wasteful expenses and focused more on the bare essentials.

[defrost]

To be more specific the person you replied to has confused total amount present (of U, etc), with total amount recoverable (at any cost), and not even addressed total amount that is economically feasible (a cost that can be afforded).

WRT: "total amount"

Elements in suspension in ocean water become increasingly dilute as more of them are removed .. so "in theory" 'all you need to do' is move the entire ocean from one bucket to another and remove what you need as you do so ... (otherwise you are constamtly circling back for diminishing returns).

WRT: "recoverable"

Then there is the no small matter of exactly how uranium (or other elements) are extracted, by what means and at what efficiency - today it's unclear what the answer for that is at scale.

WRT: "economically feasible"

Once you have a method, how much can be recovered at a sensible cost .. for less energy than the energy expended for the recovery task, how much gold can you mine for lesss than the value of the gold recovered, etc.

It's not feasible to mine all the roadways on the planet to recover all the valuable minerals burnt away in catalytic converter.

[cornholio]

You might want to read up on this topic. The total amount of Uranium in the oceans is estimated at 4.5 billion tonnes, constantly replenishing at a rate much higher than we could currently imagine consuming.

Feasibility studies were done since the 70s assessing the opportunity to exploit this resource, and found a that Titanium oxide hydrate adsorption bed could be able to extract the resource at a cost of a few thousand $ per pound, one order of magnitude over traditional mining. Since we are talking about exponential economic growth, the notion of economic viability has only a tenuous connection to present day reality, as such growth would drastically cheapen machine labor, even to the point of deploying a software command to build the factory.

It stands to reason that such factories could still recover uranium even if the concentration in the oceans dropped, say, by 20%, so the "recoverable" quantity - in this scenario of exponential growth - is indeed, in the billions of tons. Each cubic meter of ocean water contains 3 mg of Uranium or something like 100 kWh of energy, far more than the energy required to circulate ocean water to the surface to get at it. Of course, there could be ecological reasons why you would not want to do that, as well as an enormous source of energy to solve them.

[defrost]

> You might want to read up on this topic.

What, by reading the Uranium Resources, Production and Demand Red book every year for more than two decades?

Perhaps by developing and authoring a large chunk of a global mineral intelligence database and flogging that off to the US S&P ?

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

Reading several thousand economic feasibility studies?

Having a career in geophysics? Maybe mapping global K-U-Th from radiometric surveys after developing instrumentation?

Perhaps you might want to be less of a condescending tit?

[cornholio]

So I gather from your invective spiked tantrum that you concede there are no fundamental hard limits that prevent the recovery, in principle, of at least 1 billion tons of U from the oceans, at a future price point we can't currently estimate?

[fluoridation]

Like I said before, we need to make a distinction between what's possible in principle and what's actually possible. There's nothing, in principle, that prevents you from winning the lottery, so would you therefore go on massive debt after buying a ticket?