The progress of study on the in-situ bioleaching in a sand stone uranium mine, China
A sand stone uranium mine, located in the north-west of China-Xinjiang, is one of the largest acid in-situ uranium leaching mines with about 20 years mining history. Since there has been a sharp decline in the uranium recovery after mined for a period with acid in-situ leaching, the miners tried to introduce insitu bioleaching technique to improve the efficiency of uranium recovery. In this work we focused on this aim and the recent progress in applied biotechnology in in-situ leaching. This study reports both the lab pipe and pilot in-situ bioleaching experiments. Mixed cultures, composed of the dominant spiecies Acidothiobacillus ferrooxidans, Acidothiobacillus thiooxicdans and Acidomicrobium sp. , which were enriched and isolated from the acid leachate and adapted to the leachate and raffine, were cultured in the raffine supplement with 2-3 g/L ferrous ion at 20tC in lab and the mine site, respectively. The results showed that the uranium leaching rate was 15.6％ in acidified stage and 69.4％ in bioleaching stage by pipe bioleaching experiment in laboratory. Compared with acid in-situ leaching in field experiments, uranium concentration of in-situ bioleaching was increased from 21 mg/L to 36 mg/L by single borehole test in an old mined area and from 15 mg/L to 50 -60 mg/L by multi-borehole tests in the new mining area. This indicated that bioleaching is especially effective in this sand stone uranium mine and it would have good application prospects.
sandstone uranium ore in-situ bioleaching single-borehole multi-borehole consortium
Jinhui Liu Yipeng Zhou Yajie Liu Zhanxue Sun Weijun Shi
State Key Laboratory Breeding Base of Nuclear Resources and Environment,East China Institute of Tech State Key Laboratory Breeding Base of Nuclear Resources and Environment,East China Institute of Tech
国际会议
The 19th International Biohydrometallurgy Symposium(第19届国际生物湿法冶金大会 IBS2011)
长沙
英文
718-720
2011-09-18（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）