Fluxnium has raised $7 million to develop a technology that could recover uranium directly from seawater. The startup says its approach could create a new domestic source for the U.S. nuclear industry.

Congruent Ventures led the seed round, with participation from Constellation Technology Ventures and Active Impact Investments. Fluxnium will use the funding for technology development, pilot testing, and scale-up.

The company is developing a specialized fiber that captures dissolved uranium as seawater flows across its surface. Fluxnium developed the material with a U.S. national laboratory.

The approach targets a difficult engineering problem. Oceans contain enormous quantities of uranium, but the element exists at extremely low concentrations.

Seawater contains an estimated 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium. That resource dwarfs currently identified deposits on land.

Extracting it economically remains difficult because uranium atoms are spread across vast volumes of water. Fluxnium’s system focuses on capturing those atoms without pumping seawater through a large processing facility.

Its fiber provides a large surface area for uranium adsorption. The material can sit inside longline systems deployed in open water.

Fluxnium modeled the infrastructure on marine farming systems. Seaweed and mussel operations already use similar longline structures in offshore environments.

Operators would retrieve the fiber after it collects uranium. Processing would then recover the uranium before crews redeploy the material.

That cycle could allow production capacity to grow through additional fiber deployment. It could also avoid the lengthy development process associated with opening new uranium mines.

The technology arrives as the United States looks to strengthen its nuclear fuel supply chain.

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