LOL. An overview article that was obsolete even in 2016 when it was published. You need to get with the times.

"... the amount of uranium in seawater is truly renewable as well as inexhaustible."

"New technological breakthroughs from DOE's Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater economically possible."

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1882/nuclear-power-becomes-...

More recently:

Ultra-highly efficient enrichment of uranium from seawater via studtite nanodots growth-elution cycle

Nature, 2024.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50951-4

High-capacity uranium extraction from seawater through constructing synergistic multiple dynamic bonds

Nature, 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-024-00346-y

If you prefer a popular overview:

Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

A speculative bubble is not the same as serious serious demand, and the actual demand never materialized. The vast majority of the "prospecting" was just speculators, not serious mining companies. And for serious prospecting, the 4 year time-frame was way too short, you just barely get done with the early stages of

- land acquisition and permitting

- Geological surveys (airborne radiometrics, mapping, geochemistry)

- Target generation

- Initial drilling programs

- Preliminary resource estimates (if successful)

You don't have enough to get to actual serious exploration and feasibility studies:

- Infill drilling

- Metallurgical testing

- Environmental baseline studies

- Scoping and feasibility studies

- More permitting

- Community consultation

Breeder reactors exist, they face the same problem as recycling: mined uranium is still way too cheap to make investment in those technologies economically attractive.

Should Uranium get more scarce and thus more expensive, the economic incentives change very quickly and then we can pull those technologies off the shelf.

Same for Thorium reactors: currently not necessary, as we have plenty of Uranium for the existing Uranium based designs. Doesn't stop companies like Copenhagen Atomics from investing, as they see other advantages in addition to very readily available fuel.