Can someone speak on UC Davis/Buckyball theory

I wrote a comment back in April on this thread that is relevant to this topic. I'll copy it here:

There are already trace amounts of natural uranium in the oceans, to the tune of 3.3 parts per billion. This amounts to 3.3 micrograms per liter of seawater, or 8×10¹⁵ uranium atoms in each liter of seawater. In fact, though there are only trace amounts of uranium, there is enough that scientists have been trying for decades to develop economical ways of extracting uranium from seawater to replace traditional uranium mining. Here's a recent news article about this type of research, as well as a seminal paper from 1964 by Davies et al. for more information.

The Armstrong et al. paper describes some exotic molecules that uranium can form under the conditions inside the Fukushima reactors. Given the presence of uranium in seawater naturally and the small amount of uranium that could have been dissolved to form these compounds, uranium will not be much of a radiological hazard — even if these compounds were formed and were released into the ocean.

Mark [BRAWM Team Member]