Removal and recovery of uranium from solid wastes by supercritical carbon dioxide fluid leaching method

Meguro, Yoshihiro; Tomioka, Osamu; Imai, Tomoki*; Fujimoto, Shigeyuki*; Nakashima, Mikio; Yoshida, Zenko; Honda, Tadashi*; Koya, Fumio*; Kitamura, Nobu*; Wada, Ryutaro*; et al.

Proceedings of International Waste Management Symposium 2004 (WM '04) (CD-ROM), 8 Pages, 2004/03

Supercritical CO fluid leaching (SFL) method using supercritical CO fluid containing a complex of HNO - tri-n-butyl phosphate (TBP) was applied to removal of uranium from radioactive solid wastes. Sea sands, incineration ashes and porous alumina bricks were employed as matrixes of simulated solid wastes. Real radioactive incineration ash wastes and firebrick wastes were also subjected to the SFL treatment. It was found that uranium could be efficiently removed from both of the simulated wastes and real wastes by the SFL method. The removal efficiency of uranium from the real waste was lower than that from the corresponding artificial waste. About 1 g and 35 mg of uranium were recovered from 10 g of the real ash waste and 37 g of the real firebrick waste, respectively.