LAUSR

Developing a highly efficient method to recover uranium from metallurgical waste can alleviate the shortage of uranium resources. However, the dissociation of uranium is limited by the ultrafine uranium particles embedded in the gangue. Dilute alkali pretreatment is an effective process to improve the dissociation rate of uranium. Moreover, the leaching kinetics of the pulverized gangue during the pretreatment process is the decisive factor affecting the efficiency of uranium dissociation. The traditional shrinking core model cannot accurately depict the leaching kinetics of low-grade uranium ore due to the encapsulation of gangue minerals. The Avrami equation was used to investigate the dissociation kinetics of uranium during pretreatment. The results showed that the alkali pretreatment decreased the activation energy and reaction order of subsequent reactions by pulverizing the gangue structure and producing a leaching “micro-path”, thus significantly reducing the dependence of the uranium acid leaching process on temperature and acid concentration.