Anti-biofouling bio-adsorbent with ultrahigh uranium extraction capacity: One uranium resource recycling solution

Uranium extraction from seawater is an effective solution to the shortage of uranium resources on land. However, because of the high salinity in seawater, an extremely low uranium concentration (~3.3 ppb) and biofouling caused drastically decrease the performance of adsorbents, and the practical development of uranium extraction from seawater still faces major challenges. Here, we demonstrated a simple strategy to utilize waste feather fiber (FF) to prepare anti-biofouling amidoxime functionalized FF (FF-Cu2O/AO), which was applied to the extraction uranium from seawater. The introduction of Cu2O endows FF-Cu2O/AO with anti-biofouling and enhances the binding of uranyl ions to amidoxime. FF-Cu2O/AO exhibited outstanding uranium adsorption performance, adsorbing 816 mg-U/g-Ads from 8 ppm uranium-spiked water. Following immersion in natural seawater for 30 days, the uranium extraction capacity of FF-Cu2O/AO reached 7.73 mg-U/g-Ads. More importantly, the strategy can be used for the preparation of other uranium adsorbents based on amidoxime functionalized polymer fibers to provide antibacterial and improved adsorption performance. Economic analysis shows that the cost of FF-Cu2O/AO adsorption of uranium from natural seawater is much lower than that of conventional adsorbents. Therefore, FF-Cu2O/AO would be an outstanding candidate for extracting uranium from seawater because of its high uranium extraction capacity, anti-biofouling and low-cost.