Development of a Chitosan Based Adsorbent for Arsenic Removal

摘要

Arsenic is a big concern to the nuclear industry due to its release from uranium mill tailings which are found to contaminate the groundwater. According to a report by United States General Accounting Office, uranium mill tailings from the ore processing resulted in contamination at about 50 sites. Although the most hazardous constituent of uranium mill tailings is radium, other potentially hazardous substances in the tailings include arsenic, molybdenum, and selenium. In the same report, it was noted that one of the possible methods for decontamination of groundwater of these hazardous metals may be the use of an active cleanup technique such as pumping the water out of the ground and treating it. An adsorption process will be best suited for this type of clean-up technique. However, a low cost adsorbent having good capacity for arsenic, molybdenum, and selenium will be necessary for the adsorption process to be economically viable. In this work, we have prepared a chitosan-based adsorbent and evaluated its capacity for arsenic. In general, it is noted that in adsorption processes the liquid samples are analyzed and the adsorption capacity of solid adsorbents is calculated from the mass balance equation. In this work, solid adsorbent beads were directly analyzed by NAA for arsenic content.