Recovery of Uranium from Wet-Process Phosphoric Acid Fred J. Hurst,' David J. Crouse, and Keith B. Brown Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn. $7830
A two-cycle process for recovering uranium by extraction with di(2-ethylhexyl)phosphoric acid plus trioctylphosphine oxide in an aliphatic diluent has been developed and demonstrated successfully in bench-scale mixer-settler tests. The uranium is recovered from the solvent and concentrated by reducing it to the less extractable tetravalent form with ferrous iron contained in reduced process raffinate. This solution is oxidized and processed in a second cycle with the same extractant. In the second cycle the uranium is stripped from the solvent with ammonium carbonate solution and recovered as a high-grade (>97% U3Oe) product. Overall recovery of uranium is about 95%. In the bench-scale tests, losses of the relatively expensive solvent to the aqueous raffinate were satisfactorily low (
