Significantly enhanced uranium extraction by intelligent light-driven nanorobot catchers with precise controllable moving trajectory.

ABSTRACT

Uranium, as the most essential resource for nuclear power production, provides 13% of global electricity demand, has attracted considerable attention. However, it is still a great challenge for uranium extraction from natural water like salt lakes as the background of high salinity and low concentration (3.3 ∼ 330 ppb). Meanwhile, current uranium extraction strategies are generally focus on extraction capacity or selectivity but neglect to enhance extraction rate. In this work, we designed a novel kind of NIR-driven intelligent nanorobots catchers (MSSA-AO) with amidoxime as claws for uranium capture, which showed almost 100% extraction rate and an ultrafast extraction rate. Importantly, high extraction capacity (221.5 mg g-1) and selectivity were taken into consideration as well as good regeneration performance. Furthermore, amidoxime NRCs boosted in extraction amount about 16.7% during the first 5 min with self-driving performance. Overall, this work suggests a new strategy for ultrafast extraction of uranium from natural water with low abundance selectively by self-propelled NRCs, showing great possibility in outdoor application and promising for meeting huge energy needs globally.