Take some regular old acrylic knitting yarn, modify it with a special kind of adsorbent chemical, and wave it around in the ocean. After some time, the yarn will pick up enough molecules of uranium that grams of yellowcake, the precursor to fuel used in nuclear reactors, can be made.

Of course, that description is a little reductive. The tricky part is the second step: finding an affordable adsorbent material that will attract uranium in a marine environment and then relinquish it so that it can be processed into nuclear fuel. Researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state say they’ve done that, and they suspect that their method might be approaching an economically viable point.