Uranium processing Plant

There are over a hundred types of uranium ores. Those that are mainly used in industries include pitchblende, uraninite while autunite, potassium uranium vanadium, calcium uranium, silicon water uranium and titanium uranium are also frequently used in industries. The uranium ores can be divided into several categories in terms of industry use, including granite uranium ore, volcanic uranium ore, sandstone uranium ore, carbon silicon mudstone, sedimentary rocks, quartz conglomerate, and proterozoic unconformity related uranium ore. Uranium ores are most commonly found in Canada, the United States, former Soviet Union, Australia, South Africa, Namibia, Niger and France.

Uranium processing technological process

The beneficiation of uranium ores is a process in which we separate, concentrate and extract uranium from uranium ores or ores that contain uranium. The beneficiation of uranium ores includes chemical beneficiation and physical beneficiation.

The beneficiation of uranium ores includes chemical beneficiation and physical beneficiation. However, chemical beneficiation is more popular in the extraction of uranium from uranium ores by adopting hydrometallurgical process. In the beneficiation of some specific uranium ores, we sometimes burn the ores before leaching them. Burning could improve the solubility of useful elements in the ores or improve the ore’s physical properties, thus increasing the leaching rate. For metal sulphide that is rich in uranium, we could extract mixed ore concentrate and extract uranium after the leaching process. Another approach is to extract single metal concentrate through flotation and then leaching the concentrate. According to the properties of the ores, we could leach the concentrate in acid or alkaline to extract uranium, or we could get rid of part of the tailings after certain process. In the case of iron boron containing uranium ore, we could adopt the magnetic separation-gravity concentration-grading process, a process leading to higher recovery rate of iron, uranium and boron.

Chemical beneficiation

Traditional uranium ore processing starts with the leaching of ores. The leaching solution includes acid and alkaline. Acid leaching is applicable to the processing of silicate mineral, in which few mineral reacts to acid. Alkaline leaching is applicable to the processing of uranium ores that is rich in carboninites.

When we get the acid-leached ore pulp, we could carry out solid-liquid separation or sediment separation process in which the coarse sand will be washed, and then extract and concentrate uranium from the liquid or ore pulp. As to low-grade uranium ores, we prefer liquid absorption or pulp absorption in the process. And in the case of high-grade uranium ores, we could adopt liquid extraction or pulp extraction. After the extraction process, we re-extract uranium from the saturated organic phase to get high purity uranium products.

After the acid leaching ore pulp through solid-liquid separation and washing process, we will get clear liquid. The clear liquid could use chemical precipitation to make chemical concentrate. To get the chemical concentrate, we also could use acidification method with vil and then process it in accordance with acid process. For the hydrometallurgy factory which acid leaching and alkaline leaching the two process, it is suitable to choose acid-base mixed processing flow.

Physical beneficiation

Prior to the metallurgical hydrometallurgy processing of some uranium ores, we would carry out physical beneficiation for the following three purposes:

1. Improving the uranium grade for metallurgical process and eliminate part of tailings. Radioactive selection is quite popular in the physical beneficiation of uranium ores. The method usually consists of two processes. First, sending the ores by ore vehicles or trucking to radioactive inspection station for selection, where high grade ores will be transferred to the hydrometallurgical plant while wasted ores will be used as filings. Second, the high grade ores will be moved to the radioactive separation plant, and through crushing, screening and washing process, the materials will be divided into ore concentrate and tailings by the radioactive separator.
2. We will divide the raw ores into several groups and carry out metallurgical processing separately. The method, which first groups the raw ores by flotation and then carries out metallurgical process, could significantly reduce the consumption of agents and increase leaching rate.
3. Integrated recovery of useful elements. Targets of the process include quartz pebbles and quartz ores as they both contain gold and uranium. We could recover uranium, gold and pyrite through the process. In the process, we first recover gold and then uranium, or first uranium and then gold, with pyrite being the last to recover by flotation. We could also recover pyrite by flotation at first, and then extract uranium and gold from the ore concentrate and tailings.

Uranium Ore processing project

1. Uranium ore processing
2. Uranium ore mining
3. Uranium ore crushing