Abstract
With global demand for nuclear power expected to rise, new nuclear fuel resources must be explored to ensure the viability and sustainability of nuclear power. Uranium recovery from seawater is one potential source, though the low concentration of uranium in seawater is a significant obstacle. As a concentrate of seawater, desalination brine reject would have a significantly higher uranyl concentration. In this work, the adsorption of uranium and competing ions in brine reject is investigated. Adsorption experiments were performed over 84 days in 5-gallon batch tanks with amidoxime adsorbents and samples taken from the feed seawater and reverse osmosis brine reject of the Tampa Bay Desalination Plant. The aqueous concentration and adsorbed mass of uranium, zinc, copper, iron, vanadium, calcium, and magnesium were determined through inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy. Aqueous adsorption modeling was used to simulate speciation and adsorption of these ions under the experimental conditions. The adsorbed mass of uranium in seawater was 6.22 mg/g adsorbent which declined to 3.95 mg/g in brine. This is a result of increased competition from iron and vanadium whose adsorbed masses increased from 1.06 to 3.00 mg/g and 1.05 to 2.67 mg/g, respectively. Good agreement between experimental and predicted results was obtained for all ions in seawater. Uranium adsorption was overpredicted in brine which may be attributed to the presence of other competing ions and the system not being at equilibrium. Results demonstrate that the influence of competing ions, such as those of iron and vanadium, on uranium adsorption would need to be reduced for brine reject to become a significant uranium resource.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 17237-17244 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research |
Volume | 57 |
Issue number | 50 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 19 2018 |
Funding
This work was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy. The authors thank Chris Janke, Sadananda Das, and Richard Mayes of ORNL for providing the adsorbent used in the study. The PNNL effort was performed under Contract DE-AC05-76RL01830. Work at ORNL was performed under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. Work at Georgia Tech was supported by the Nuclear Energy University Program under Project 14-6789. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy. gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
Funders | Funder number |
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U.S. Department of Energy | |
Office of Nuclear Energy | |
Nuclear Energy University Program | 14-6789 |