"Potential uranium recovery by percolation
leaching from El Missikat mineralized silica
vein, Eastern Desert, Egypt"
Accepted 7th
May, 2020
Nagar, M. S., Kamal, H. M., Abd El
monsif, M., and Ghazala, R. A.
Nuclear Materials Authority, P. O. Box. 530, Maady, Cairo, Egypt.
El-Missikat area is one of the most important
uranium occurrences in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Uranium occurrences are
indeed strongly associated with silicified and fracture shear zones. It is
characterized by the presence of galena, pyrite, uranophane, kasolite, wulvenite
and colombite. Agitation and column percolation leaching techniques applied upon
the uranium rich mineralization (El Missikat) showed that these techniques
succeeded in providing considerable results. It can be concluded that El
Missikat uranium mineralized ore is feasible for leaching (column percolation)
as about 140 kg ore sample assayed 1850 mgU//kg, after 75% leaching efficiency
using 24 g/kg acid consumption in 40 days of work. Ion exchange technique was
used to recover uranium from pregnant uranium solution, which gave 83% and 96%
loading and elution efficiency, respectively.
Key words:
El Missikat, Uranium, Agitation, Percolation, Recovery.
This is an open access article
published under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
Cite this article as:
Nagar MS, Kamal HM, El monsif AM, Ghazala RA (2020). "Potential uranium recovery
by percolation leaching from El Missikat mineralized silica vein, Eastern
Desert, Egypt". Acad. J. Environ. Sci.
8(5): 071-080.
