Uranium Extraction and Recovery from Aqueous Environments
This community develops materials and methods to capture, remove, and recover uranium from water sources, including seawater, groundwater, and nuclear wastewater.
The research focuses on designing sorbents and photocatalysts to selectively bind uranyl ions in aqueous solutions. Recurring approaches include the use of metal-organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, graphene oxide, and chitosan-based composites. A significant portion of the work addresses the specific challenge of extracting uranium from seawater, while another stream targets the removal of uranium from industrial and nuclear wastewater. Photocatalytic reduction and electrochemical extraction are also prominent methods, often combined with advanced carbon-based materials to enhance efficiency and selectivity in complex chemical environments.
The largest share of the community's output is found in uranium research, accounting for 18.5% of all uranium research, with 19,873 papers in this group. Plutonium and thorium research also contribute significantly, representing 8.0% and 6.2% of their respective element research, with 2,920 and 2,409 papers here.
The community comprises 38,326 papers, publishing most frequently in the Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, Health Physics, and Radiochimica Acta.
Recent work continues to focus on optimizing photocatalytic uranium extraction using covalent organic frameworks and exploring scalable architectures for seawater uranium recovery, with recent publications addressing challenges in moving from laboratory settings to practical marine applications.