Successive Leaching of Uranium and Associated Elements from the Mineralized Rocks of Abu Thor Locality, Southwestern Sinai, Egypt

Abstract

The chemical processing of the poly-mineralized carbonate-rich latosol ore material occurring at Abu Thor locality of Southwestern Sinai area has been studied for the recovery of uranium, copper, vanadium and lanthanides (Lns) metal values.

To realize this goal, a technological representative sample of Abu Thor mineralization was properly collected and which was found to assay 700 ppm U and up to 9.7% Cu, 789 ppm V and 456 Lns . The present work has thus been firstly oriented towards the recovery of both uranium and copper from the study ore material by using two successive percolation leaching procedures. For the former, urea was used as a selective non-conventional and economic organic solvent followed by ammonium hydroxide solution for selective leaching of the associated copper. Beside the agitation leaching procedure , the characteristics of the percolation leaching technique have also been determined for both U and Cu metal values. To optimize the agitation leaching relevant parameters for uranium by using urea, different series of agitation leaching experiments have been performed. In these experiments, a suitable weight of the working ore material, ground to -60 mesh size, was