High effectiveness of pure polydopamine in extraction of uranium and plutonium from groundwater and seawater

Valery N Bliznyuk; Kamila Kołacińska; Alexander A Pud; Nikolay A Ogurtsov; Yuriy V Noskov; Brian A Powell; Timothy A DeVol

doi:10.1039/c9ra06392g

High effectiveness of pure polydopamine in extraction of uranium and plutonium from groundwater and seawater

RSC Adv. 2019 Sep 24;9(52):30052-30063. doi: 10.1039/c9ra06392g. eCollection 2019 Sep 23.

Authors

Valery N Bliznyuk^{1

2}, Kamila Kołacińska³, Alexander A Pud⁴, Nikolay A Ogurtsov⁴, Yuriy V Noskov⁴, Brian A Powell^{1

5

2}, Timothy A DeVol^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, Clemson University Clemson SC 29634-0919 USA vblizny@clemson.edu devol@clemson.edu.
² Nuclear Environmental Engineering Sciences and Radioactive Waste Management (NEESRWM) Center, Clemson University Clemson SC 29634-0942 USA.
³ Institute of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology in Warsaw Poland.
⁴ V. P. Kukhar Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry and Petrochemistry, NAS of Ukraine 50 Kharkivske Shose Kyiv 02160 Ukraine.
⁵ Department of Chemistry, Clemson University Clemson SC 29634 USA.

Abstract

Sorption properties of polydopamine (PDA) for uranium and plutonium from an aqueous environment are reported at three different pH values (2, 4 and 6.5-7). In addition to deionized (DI) water, artificial groundwater (GW) and seawater (SW) were used with U uptake close to 100% in each case. PDA polymer has been identified as a material with extremely high sorption capacity Q _max ∼500 mg g^-1 of the polymer at pH 6.5 and high selectivity for uranium. Similar high sorption properties are revealed for plutonium uptake. PDA-uranyl and PDA-plutonium interactions responsible for the observed adsorption processes have been addressed with a set of experimental techniques including FTIR spectroscopy, electron microscopy and cyclic voltammetry.