SuperCritical Materials announced on September 22, 2026, a research partnership with the University of Michigan to design, prototype, and test offshore systems capable of extracting uranium dissolved in seawater. The goal is to determine whether the technology developed so far in the laboratory can withstand the mechanical stresses of large-scale industrial deployment in a marine environment.
The world’s oceans contain an estimated 4.5 billion metric tons of dissolved uranium — a vast reserve, widely dispersed and, until now, inaccessible at competitive costs. The technology at the heart of the project relies on a patented adsorbent material for which SuperCritical holds an exclusive license: as seawater flows across its surface, uranium is chemically captured. The material is then recovered after a defined exposure period and processed to yield fuel. The final steps draw on standard nuclear industry operations, including elution, reverse osmosis, precipitation, and yellowcake production.
The research will be led by Professor Maha Haji, a mechanical engineering faculty member at the University of Michigan and director of the Symbiotic Engineering and Analysis Laboratory. Haji is no stranger to the field: during her doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she had already designed, built, and sea-tested uranium extraction systems integrated with offshore infrastructure. The tests planned under the new partnership will be conducted at the university’s Aaron Friedman Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory, where wave and current tanks replicate real ocean conditions in a controlled setting. This allows researchers to assess the hydrodynamic behavior of various configurations before moving to open-water trials.
The research program will examine how SuperCritical’s adsorbent responds to different types of mechanical stress: compression during packaging, forces encountered during deployment, prolonged exposure to ocean currents, and loading during retrieval. As Alexander Canon Bryan, President and CEO of SuperCritical Materials, put it, “the question is no longer whether uranium can be extracted from seawater,” but whether the adsorbent material can be “deployed, exposed, and recovered efficiently and repeatedly at industrial scale.” One month before this partnership was announced, an independent engineering analysis had already identified several credible offshore deployment concepts, including platform-based, vessel-based, and underwater array systems.
The strategic backdrop is crucial. The United States imports more than 90% of its uranium supply and is actively seeking to reduce that dependence as demand for nuclear energy surges. SuperCritical aims to enter the U.S. nuclear fuel supply chain through its nearshore program, with a design targeting cost competitiveness with conventional land-based mining. The technology could also enable the recovery of 23 additional metals dissolved in seawater as a byproduct of the process.
If testing at Michigan confirms the system’s mechanical integrity, the next step will be direct open-water trials. The road to commercial production remains long, but for the first time a verified engineering pathway exists — from the laboratory to a facility capable of producing nuclear fuel from the ocean at scale. For a sector that could see global nuclear generation grow 2.5-fold over the next fifteen years, the ability to tap into virtually unlimited marine uranium reserves could structurally reshape the entire nuclear fuel supply chain.
