According to geological estimates, Moroccan phosphate contains more than three times the 1.9 million tonnes of uranium contained in the world’s largest ore reserves of this precious metal, in Australia, the report from the Middle East Institute.
According to the same source, it is the fourth most exploited material in the world, more than 90% of the extracted phosphate is used in the manufacture of synthetic fertilizers, he recalls, specifying that the OCP group ( Office Chérifien des Phosphates), a Moroccan state-owned phosphate mining and fertilizer manufacturing giant, has been manufacturing phosphoric acid since the 1980s, an intermediate product in the manufacture of phosphate fertilizers from which uranium can be extracted.
“Despite renewed interest in uranium as a phosphate by-product, the technology for recovering uranium from phosphoric acid is well established.
In the 1980s, uranium recovery from phosphoric acid accounted for 20% of U.S. uranium production, but was halted when uranium prices bottomed out in the United States. 1990s. The phosphate company Prayon, headquartered in Belgium and jointly owned by OCP and Wallonie Entreprendre, recovered approximately 690 tonnes of uranium from Moroccan phosphate rocks between 1975 and 1999″, summarizes the think tank.
And to specify that during the second Russia-Africa Summit held last month (July 27-28) in Saint Petersburg, Morocco took a further step towards nuclear cooperation with the Russian Federation by signing a agreement with a subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian public company specializing in nuclear energy. Rosatom rightly courted Rabat.
Morocco has around 73% of the world’s phosphate reserves, which also contain around 6.9 million tonnes of uranium, the largest amount available in any country.
Indeed, Rabat plans to cooperate with Rosatom in the field of seawater desalination, a very energy-intensive process whose prohibitive electricity costs currently prevent widespread use in the Middle East and North Africa.
With Morocco and the rest of the MENA region already facing debilitating levels of extreme water scarcity, affordable nuclear desalination fueled by Moroccan uranium could be an important part of the solution to providing water for agriculture. and human consumption are desperately needed, says the think tank.
Uranium prices
The general rise in uranium prices has revived interest in its recovery from phosphoric acid. Using already proven solvent extraction technologies, uranium costs would range between $44 and $61 per pound of triuranium octoxide (U3O8; a form of yellowcake and one of the most stable compounds in the uranium, commonly used in shipments between factories and refineries).
The spot price of uranium at June 30, 2023 was $56.23 per pound, down from $40.33, a 39.42% year-over-year increase. Using conventional processing technology, uranium recovery is within the realm of commercial feasibility.
Ion-exchange-based recovery processes, which are currently being tested on a commercial scale, could potentially reduce the cost of recovery. Australian company Phos Energy’s pilot plant in the United States has an operating cost of around $20 per pound of U3O8, according to the company. Commercial-scale direct leaching – the removal of uranium from phosphate rock prior to the production of phosphoric acid – could further reduce the cost of recovery.
An opportunity for a strategic nuclear relationship between the United States and Morocco
The use of renewable energy sources, particularly solar and wind, to solve the food-water-energy trilemma ultimately rests on the ability of technologies to provide solutions applicable globally and across time to meet immediate needs. Mobile desalination units powered by modular nuclear power generation can provide more easily deployable solutions as the urgency of the food-water crisis in the MENA region accelerates due to climate change.
While Morocco’s focus on mobile water desalination to address this eventuality led to its engagement with Rosatom, Rabat’s focus also benefits from synergy with Washington’s current effort to develop US capabilities in Generation IV nuclear energy technology, through the design and production of mobile microreactors. The US government’s program to develop a prototype mobile microreactor dubbed “Project Pele”, led by the Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO).
The SCO’s 1-5 MW mobile microreactor is scheduled for testing in 2024 at the Idaho National Laboratory. Project Pele is a whole-of-government initiative involving the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Nuclear Regulatory Commission, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Nuclear Security Administration. It aims to “advance energy resilience and reduce carbon emissions” for the U.S. Armed Forces and serve as a “pathfinder for commercial adoption.”
Uranium: what to remember
Uranium is a heavy metal that is found naturally in the earth’s crust and even in seawater. Present in different types of ore, uranium is approximately 1,000 times more abundant than gold .
Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and which bears the atomic number 92. Natural uranium is made up of three isotopes: uranium 238, the heaviest and most abundant, uranium 235 and uranium 234 .
Uranium 235 is the only fissile isotope. This means that it can fragment under the effect of a neutron. Explanation: under the effect of the collision with the neutron, its nucleus breaks, this is called fission. This produces radiation and an enormous amount of heat. The easiest nucleus to break is that of the uranium atom. In nuclear power plants, the heat produced by nuclear fission is used to generate electricity.
The grade of the ore extracted from the mines is often quite low. We must therefore concentrate the uranium of these ores. How ? The rocks are crushed and finely ground, then the uranium is extracted through various chemical operations. This is called processing, the result of which is a yellow paste called yellow cake containing 75% uranium oxide.
The yellow cake is then purified by a series of chemical transformations and converted into a fluorinated form (UF6: 6 fluorine atoms for one uranium atom). This is called the “conversion” operation. This pure chemical form is in the form of white solid crystals at ambient temperature and pressure, used for storage and transport. It will be put in gaseous form for the next step, which is enrichment.
In fact, to supply nuclear reactors and produce electricity, natural uranium absolutely must be enriched in uranium 235. In this way, uranium 235 is concentrated to a content of 3 to 5%, i.e. up to 7 times the content found in the yellow cake, thanks to the enrichment operation.
