Arsenic is a big concern to the nuclear industry dueto its release from uranium mill tailings which are foundto contaminate the groundwater. According to a report byUnited States General Accounting Office [1], uraniummill tailings from the ore processing resulted incontamination at about 50 sites. Although the mosthazardous constituent of uranium mill tailings is radium,other potentially hazardous substances in the tailingsinclude arsenic, molybdenum, and selenium. In the samereport, it was noted that one of the possible methods fordecontamination of groundwater of these hazardousmetals may be the use of an active cleanup technique suchas pumping the water out of the ground and treating it. Anadsorption process will be best suited for this type ofclean-up technique. However, a low cost adsorbenthaving good capacity for arsenic, molybdenum, andselenium will be necessary for the adsorption process tobe economically viable. In this work, we have prepared achitosan-based adsorbent and evaluated its capacity forarsenic. In general, it is noted that in adsorption processesthe liquid samples are analyzed and the adsorptioncapacity of solid adsorbents is calculated from the massbalance equation. In this work, solid adsorbent beadswere directly analyzed by NAA for arsenic content.
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