At one hand uranium is an element of considerable technological importance. In nuclear power plants uranium is used as fuel. Other than this, uranium has no significant commercial use. On the other hand uranium is highly toxic and radioactive heavy metal that mainly originates from nuclear-related activities and causes significant environmental and public health problems by its presence in terr...

In the face of depletion of fossil resources, the development of nuclear power in the world is inevitable. Poland is one of the few developed countries, which does not have a nuclear power plant [1]. Therefore, The programme of Polish nuclear energy has recently been implemented. Simultaneously, the interest in domestic uranium ores, which fi rst appeared in the fi ftieth of the previous centur...

The goal of this work is a detailed study of uranium detection by laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for application to activities associated with environmental surveillance and detecting weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The study was used to assist development of LIBS instruments for standoff detection of bulk radiological and nuclear materials and these materials distributed as con...

The contribution of variable grain sizes to uranium adsorption/desorption was studied using a sediment from the US DOE Hanford site. The sediment was wet sieved into four size fractions: coarse sand (1-2 mm), medium sand (0.2-1 mm), fine sand (0.053-0.2 mm), and clay/silt fraction (<0.053 mm). For each size fraction and their composite (sediment), batch and flow-cell experiments were performed ...

The environmental issues concerning uranium mining and milling have long been paid considerable attention in wide aspects in the world [1–4]. It is well known that the industrial activities of mining and milling of uranium ores can lead to release of a tremendous amount of radioactive pollutants (wastewater and tailings, as representative carrier) that consist typically of U and Th compounds. A...

It is recalled that the only non-nuclear military application in which depleted-uranium alloys out-perform present-day tungsten alloys is longrod penetration into a main battle-tank’s armor. However, this advantage is only on the order of 10% and disappearing when the uranium versus tungsten comparison is made in terms of actual lethality of complete anti-tank systems instead of laboratory-type...

Recovering uranium from seawater has been the subject of many studies for decades, and has recently seen significant progress in materials development since the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has become involved. With DOE direction, the uranium uptake for amidoxime-based polymer adsorbents has more than tripled in capacity. In an effort to better understand how these new adsorbent materials be...

Incorporation of uranium recovery into wet phosphoric acid (WPA) processes can potentially supplement a significant portion of the world's uranium production and simultaneously benefit human health and environment by reducing radiological and toxic contamination of the phosphate fertilizer products. Liquid-liquid extraction as conventional uranium recovery methods applied in industrial suffers ...

Commercially available Diphonix(®) resin (TrisKem International) was evaluated as a receiving phase for use with the diffusive gradients in thin-films (DGT) passive sampler for measuring uranium. This resin has a high partition coefficient for actinides and is used in the nuclear industry. Other resins used as receiving phases with DGT for measuring uranium have been prone to saturation and sig...

The fate of uranium in natural systems is of great environmental importance. X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy (XANES) revealed that U(VI) was reduced to U(IV) in shallow freshwater sediment at an open pit in an inactive uranium mine. Geochemical characterization of the sediment showed that nitrate, Fe(III), and sulfate had also been reduced in the sediment. Observations of the sediment p...