Webinar title: Study on Enrichment of Uranium Resources and Detection of Nuclides in Marine Environment
Speaker: Ning Wang
Webinar time: October 31, 2024 (Thursday) 15:00
Venue: Room 200, New Environmental Building
Inviter: Lizhi Zhang, Yancai Yao
Abstract:
Nuclear power accounts for 13% of the world's electricity supply without producing greenhouse gases, and will make a significant contribution to China's future carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. Uranium is a key raw material for the nuclear industry, while China is a depleted uranium country whose more than 90% of natural uranium raw materials rely on imports. The total amount of uranium in the ocean is 4.5 billion tons. It is estimated that the amount of uranium in the ocean is more than 1,000 times the total amount of uranium in known terrestrial deposits. Due to its low solubility, the concentration of soluble uranium in seawater is only 3.3 ppb. In addition, the coexistence of ocean-interfering metal ions, particularly vanadium, can compete significantly with uranium, making uranium extraction from seawater challenging. In addition, the complex marine environment can seriously endanger the adsorbent and reduce the service life of the adsorbent. Therefore, the development of uranium extraction adsorbents from seawater with high loading capacity, high specificity, fast saturation time and high reusability is the goal pursued by scientists. In order to improve the performance of uranium extraction from seawater, we have carried out researches on new materials for uranium resource enrichment in the marine environment, and have achieved positive results in the improvement of the utilization rate of uranyl coordination sites in seawater, highly selective adsorbents, and marine biological fouling prevention and control. The full exposure of coordination sites, the effective design of coordination space structure and functional groups, and the effective construction of anti-fouling adsorbents jointly promoted the improvement of uranium adsorption performance in seawater. Recently, the team has also carried out researches on the chemical detection technology of marine nuclear contaminating elements.
About the speaker:
Professor Ning Wang, Hainan University, is the Changjiang Scholar Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education, Expert with Special Government Allowance of the State Council, National Millions of Talents Project, Fellow of the Royal Society of United Kingdom Chemistry, Deputy Director of the State Key Laboratory of Marine Resources Utilization in the South China Sea. Prof. Wang graduated from Tsinghua University with a Ph.D. degree, and he studied at the University of California, Berkeley in United States and Nagoya University in Japan, mainly engaged in the field of environmental radiochemistry such as uranium extraction from seawater in the marine environment, nuclide detection, etc. He has published more than 200 SCI papers on Nature Sustainability, Nature Communnications, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Advanced Materials, etc., among which more than 20 papers are recognized as the ESI Highly Cited Paper. Prof. Wang has won the first prize of natural science in Hainan Province (ranked 1st) and the first prize of China Association of Inventions (ranked 1st), and undertook national key research and development projects and national major scientific research instrument development projects.