Facile and efficient sequestration of uranium using biomass from Saudi Arabia’s local date palms waste

Abstract

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has announced to utilize its domestic resources to enhance its future nuclear power capacity to a total of 17.6 GW by 2040. This ambitious plan is followed by mining and extraction of uranium from various approaches both physically and chemically. Therefore, an economical and efficient approach was devised for harvesting uranium content from aqueous solutions by using two bio-sorbent, i.e., date pit sawdust (DPS) and date palm biowaste (PDB). The DPS and PDB were analyzed with BET surface area, FT-IR, SEM, EDX, pHPZC and XRD techniques to examine the surface area, porosity, functional group on surface, morphology, point of zero charge of the materials and nature of materials respectively. Effect of parameters like sorbent dose, solutions pH, concentrations and time of contact on adsorption were studied in a batch method. The findings indicated that both DPS and PDB exhibited significant sequestration of U(VI) with maximum adsorption observed at 6 pH. However, PDB exhibited the maximum sorption percentage (78.80 %) and capacity (3.25 mg/g), followed by DPS (70.5 %, 2.47 mg/g, respectively), for uranium sequestration.

Keywords

• Date pit sawdust
• Palm datebiowaste
• Sequestration
• Energy
• Uranium