No abstract

This work reports the synthesis of formo-phenolic resins containing four catecholamide (CAM) moieties with admixture of phenol, catechol or resorcinol. These chelating resins have been developed to selectively extract U(VI) from seawater. This media is a challenging environment due to a pH around 8.2 and a large excess of alkaline and earth-alkaline cations. From the various sorption experiments investigated, the results indicate that the synthesized material exhibit good sorbent properties for U(VI) with uptake capacity about 50 mg/g for the more promising resins with a pronounced selectivity for uranium even under saline conditions. Thermodynamic and kinetic adsorption data were determined for the best resin (Langmuir adsorption model and pseudo-second order model).

What prompted you to investigate this topic/problem?Uranium extraction from unconventional resources like in seawater constitutes an important secondary source of uranium as well as a challenge considering the complexity of this media. Therefore, it appears challenging to propose efficient solution and solid-liquid extraction is one of the most promising processes for this purpose. Only Japanese, Chinese and Americans had proposed U extraction processes on the use of resin and that to our knowledge, Europe and France in particular had not so far proposed and investigated organic materials to meet this challenge.