Recent advances in functionalized porous adsorbents for radioactive waste water decontamination: Current status, research gap and future outlook

Recently, the revolution of industries especially nuclear power plants has given a lot of social and economic advancement. However, due to the quick developments in nuclear industries including mining and chemical processing of the different ores, resulting water sources become contaminated slowly with different toxic heavy metal and radionuclides, leading to a concern for the Earth's water resources. Efficient remediation of these hazardous radionuclides pollutants are of huge significance in recent time to save the environment and mankind. In this regard, highly ordered porous materials known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and covalent organic frameworks (COFs) have shown significant promise for separation and remediation of radioactive metal ions. MOFs and COFs based material are chemical stability and having large surface area due to easy functionalization, and high porosity. In this review article, recent developments on the potential application of porous materials termed as MOFs and COFs based material for radionuclide separation are briefly discussed and analyzed systematically. Focus has been given to address the separation and remediation of trouble shooting radioactive elements like Cs, Sr, U, Th, Se, Tc and Re from radioactive waste solutions, which are very important for radioactive liquid waste management aspect. We have discussed the interaction mechanism of radioactive species with MOFs/COFs materials. We have addressed the future research scopes and limitations of the MOFs and COFs based materials, which will motivate young researchers in this demanding area of research. Finally, we proposed our insights for the advancements of MOFs and COFs materials for real life nuclear fuel cycle applications.