Uranium is a basic and strategic resource related to national development and security. The uranium resources contained in the ocean are thousands of times that in the land, up to about 4.5 billion tons. However, it is still a severe challenge for the extraction of uranium from seawater as it contains trace amounts of uranium and a large number of cations. Herein, a new uranium extraction material, phosphate-functionalized collagen fibers, was prepared by a “covalent cross-linking” method by grafting the phosphate functional groups onto the surface of collagen fibers (CF) with a multihierarchy structure and multiple functional groups. The special structure of CF makes the adsorbent exhibit multistage kinetics and is controlled by chemisorption and layer diffusion. Through the introduction of amino and phosphoric acid functional groups, collagen fiber-alendronate sodium trihydrate (CF-AST) exhibits high-efficiency adsorption for uranium with the maximum adsorption reaching 277.78 mg g–1. In the extraction test from the East China Sea, CF-AST displayed a total uranium extraction mass of 29.61 μg after processing 10 L of seawater with an extraction rate of 89.69%. This adsorbent has shown superiorities in selectivity, kinetics, capacity, and reproducibility of uranium separation and enrichment from seawater, which is an economically viable and industrially scalable realistic uranium extraction material.

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