[en] Nowadays, several proposals have been made on the storage and final disposal of radioactive waste, one of the alternatives is Deep Geological Storage. This consists of a series of natural and artificial (or engineering) barriers between the radioactive waste and the biosphere, with the objective of not allowing the dispersion of the emissions from the deposited transuranic elements and ensuring their effectiveness until the activity of the radioactive elements have decayed. Therefore, several studies have focused on the development of ceramic materials that have the ability to avoid the dispersion of radionuclides and dissipation of heat emitted by radioactive waste. In this work, the use of the zirconium orthosilicate or zircon (ZrSiO₄) is proposed for the construction of the engineering barriers that will be used in the Deep Geological Storage. The zircon was isolated by chemical methods, from sea sand from Baja California, Mexico, later the ZrSiO₄ obtained was separated to different grain sizes (100, 200 y 300 mesh), the samples were irradiated with gamma rays produced by ⁶⁰Co at the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nucleares, zircon was exposed to gamma doses of 5, 10 y 30 MGy. The non-irradiated samples and samples irradiated with gamma radiation doses were characterized by X-ray diffraction, Infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and thermoluminescent. The results obtained show that the structure of materials were not affected by the effect of gamma radiation, however, by scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy, small changes were observed in the morphology and topography of the study sample as the radiation doses increases. Afterwards, the uranyl ions adsorption properties on the surface of de non-irradiated and irradiated samples of ZrSiO₄ were evaluated. In addition to increasing the adsorption efficiency the zircon surface was functionalized with phytic acid, by infrared spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, the functional groups and energy states due to functionalization of the surface of ZrSiO₄ with phytic acid were identified. The characterization of the surface properties was carried out by determining the surface area, fractal dimension, the optimal hydration time, isoelectric point by mass titration y density of surface sites density by potentiometric titration was evaluated. The results obtained indicated that grain size has a great influence on the uranyl ion retention efficiency on the surface and energy storage absorbed in the structure of ZrSiO₄ from gamma radiation. (author)