The Separation of Uranium from Seawater using Amidoxime containing Polymer

Scientific Essay from the year 2023 in the subject Chemistry - Nuclear Chemistry, grade: 70, University of Greenwich, language: English, abstract: Technically, it is possible to separate uranium from seawater. This design paper seeks to propose a process intensified way to separate uranium from seawater using amidoxime containing polymer due to the high affinity of the uranyl-carbonate complex towards the polyamidoxime resin. The process justification was based on the economic criteria: production cost, physicochemical criteria: concentration and reactivity, technical criteria: extracting methods from a complex aqueous system.

The separation process firstly is the adsorption of uranyl ions using ionic exchange resin in the form of a chelating polymer adsorbent. A buoyant platform with adsorbent polymer made of polyethylene fibres that comes into contact directly with seawater powered by a wind turbine which is mounted on top of the platform, continuously takes the adsorbent from the seawater after campaign time through an elution and regeneration process and then returns it to the seawater for reuse. After the adsorbent has been loaded with uranyl ions, additional downstream processes are explored to recover the uranium including cleansing of the adsorption polymer to remove organic materials, desorption: elution of the adsorbed uranium ions from the adsorption polymer with a suitable solution, purification of the eluent: removal of other desorbed compounds, concentrating the solution, solvent extraction of uranium from the solution with a mixture of an organic solvent and a specific complexing agent and finally conversion into yellow cake or uranium oxide U_3 0_8. Next, factors that go into the Uranium separation cost and financial justifications have been included. In the future, we recommend researchers to make use of organically sourced, biodegradable substrates such as chitin which could be a good source of green chemistry alternative to conventional plastic polymers that represents a potential source of an uneasy degradable solid pollutant.