“Retention of Some Radiocontaminants in Natural and Modified Clay Minerals from Radioactive Liquid Waste”

Abstract

Radioactive waste is produced from the various applications of radionuclides in research, medicine, industry as well as the nuclear fuel cycle used for power generation and military uses and from radiological accidents. Removal of hazardous elements from radioactive and industrial wastes has environmental and economic importance. Several methods are available for treatment processes, including chemical precipitation, sorption and ion exchange. A wide range of materials is available for the ion exchange treatment of liquid radioactive waste e.g., natural ion exchangers clays and clay minerals. This thesis is focused on evaluating the use of natural ball clay and its different modified forms to remove cobalt, strontium, cerium and gadolinium ions from aqueous solutions. A comparison was made between the materials resulting from the modification and the optimum material was selected to be used in the removal process. The result from the comparison indicated that the optimum ball clay was modified with acrylic acid and phosphoric acid using gamma irradiation polymerization technique (BC-AA-PA). The work executed in this thesis is presented in three main chapters, namely; Introduction; Experimental and Methods and Results and Discussion.