‘Brine Management through brine mining of trace metals’ for developing Secondary sources of nuclear fuel

Abstract

The brine and seawater are important and largely untapped sources of critical trace metals and elements. The coupling of selective recovery of trace metals from seawater/brine with desalination plants gives an added advantage of energy credits to desalination plants and as well as reduce the cost of desalinated water. In this paper, status review on recovery of important trace metals and other alkali metals from seawater is presented. The potential of Indian desalination plants for recovery of trace metals, based on recovery ratio of 0.35 is also highlighted. Studies carried out by the process based on adsorption using Radiation Induced Grafted (RIG) polymeric adsorbents and then fractional elutions are presented. The fouling factors due to bio fouling and dirt fouling have been estimated for various locations of interest through field trails. The pay loader in the form of compact Contactor Assembly with minimum pressure drop, for loading specially designed radiation grafted sorbent in leaflet form has been briefed, as required for plant scale facility. The typical conceptual process design details of farm assembly of project CRUDE are described.