Recovering uranium from wet-process phosphoric acid

Increasing uranium prices offer the phosphate industry an attractive opportunity to recover uranium as a byproduct of fertilizer manufacture. By removing the material from phosphoric acid produced in 1976 will contain about 3,000 tons of dissolved U3O8, and this amount is projected to increase to about 8,000 tons/yr by the end of the century. This paper describes the DEPA-TOPO process which has been successfully demonstrated in pilot plant operations at several phosphate plants, and full-scale plants based on the process are presently being designed. While not as fully developed as the DEPA-TOPO technique, the OPAP process has several advantages over the former. OPAP extracts U4+, the prevailing oxidation state in fresh phosphoric acid, whereas DEPA-TOPO recovers U6+. Details of both processes are given