Editorial pubs.acs.org/IECR
Preface to the Special Issue: Uranium in Seawater
T
period and featured 42 presentations with speakers from around the world. In keeping with the national meeting’s programmatic theme, “The Chemistry of Natural Resources”, the symposium provided a comprehensive and detailed snapshot of a critical topic: the separation and recovery of uranium from seawater in an environmentally compatible manner. This Special Issue is a result of that symposium, with results updated to the time of submission. The research has been sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Nuclear Energy (NE).
he 249th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society was held in March 2015 in Denver, Colorado. At the Spring ACS meeting, a symposium entitled Uranium in Seawater was organized by Dr. Phillip Britt (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and Prof. Robin Rogers (McGill University) within the Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Division and was cosponsored by the Committee on Environmental Improvement (CEI), the Multidisciplinary Program Planning Group (MPPG) and the Division of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology (NUCL). The symposium extended over a two-day
Figure 1. NE Seawater Uranium Recovery Program Team.
Special Issue: Uranium in Seawater Published: April 20, 2016 © 2016 American Chemical Society
4101
DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.6b01293 Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2016, 55, 4101−4102
Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research
Editorial
The mission of the DOE’s Fuel Resources subprogram is to “identify and implement actions to assure that economic nuclear fuel resources remain available in the United States”. In focusing on uranium resources at the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle, there are opportunities in conventional terrestrial production, as well as innovative approaches. One of the latter opportunities is in the recovery of uranium from seawater, because of the more than 4 billion tons of dissolved uranium in seawater. The challenge is that the uranium is present at an extremely low level (3.3 ppb), bound to carbonate (for which it has a high affinity), and in a solution where other ions are present at far greater levels. Along with the need for very high selectivity, any process must be harmless to the environment and operate at the pH of seawater (∼8). In 2011, DOE NE brought together a multidisciplinary team from national laboratories, universities, and research institutes (Figure 1) to define the potential for recovering uranium from seawater as a sustainable fuel resource for U.S. reactors. The NE team’s objective is the development of advanced adsorbent materials for the reduction of seawater uranium recovery cost and uncertainties, potentially unlocking a virtually limitless supply of uranium fuel at a known price. The team effort took advantage of recent developments in (1) high-performance computing, (2) advanced characterization instruments, and (3) nanomanufacturing technology to enable technical breakthroughs, and proceeds in cooperation with researchers in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Japan Atomic Energy Agency. The technical objectives include: (1) increasing sorption capacity by tailoring the properties of the support structure and ligands; (2) improving uranium selectivity by studying its coordination chemistry and binding mechanism; (3) increasing sorption kinetics to decrease the contact time in seawater; and (4) decreasing materials degradation to increase reuse and recycling. The papers in this Special Issue detail how these objectives were approached via synthesis, computations, characterization, and marine testing studies.
Spiro D. Alexandratos,* Associate Editor, I&EC Research Department of Chemistry, Hunter College
Stephen Kung, Program Manager
■
U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
■
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We gratefully acknowledge Prof. Phillip Savage, Editor-in-Chief of I&EC Research, for his support of this special issue.
4102
DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.6b01293 Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2016, 55, 4101−4102
