China develops plant to extract hydrogen, fresh water and uranium from the sea

Chinese scientists have built a small, stable co-production plant that uses one system to extract hydrogen and fresh water from seawater, while also recovering uranium and bromine and improving electricity use efficiency by about 15 per cent.The team, led by Deng Dehui and Liu Yanting from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, improved on an existing technology that is both costly and power hungry, according to a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Energy.Producing hydrogen from seawater in a process powered by renewable energy is an important route to green hydrogen, but both of the two main approaches have their drawbacks.