Comparative life cycle assessment of uranium recovery from brine

Download

Melike Benan ALTAY_Corrected MS Thesis.pdf

Date

2022-4-15

Author

Altay, Melike Benan

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

213
views

162
downloads

With the increase in world population and the associated increase in raw material, clean water, and energy demands, seeking for innovative and sustainable methods to decrease the human-made environmental footprint becomes a task of utmost importance. Uranium-based atomic energy the generation has an enormous potential to efficiently supply energy demand at the cost of high environmental impact on water bodies. Therefore, estimating the environmental impacts of the uranium recovery systems from desalination waste is a necessity. This study assessed the environmental impact of the uranium recovery methods from brine with amidoximated adsorbents and compared them with the conventional uranium mining methods. This study also aims to analyze the environmental load of desalination plants integrated with uranium recovery methods from brine. The results showed that recovery of uranium from brine in the long run is more effective than the conventional procedures. The other results claim that the combination of uranium recovery from brine systems with desalination plants causes to impact reduction in marine ecotoxicity. The sensitivity analysis results reveal that hydroxylamine and hazardous waste disposal are the most influential parameters during uranium recovery with adsorbent methods. The results of sensitivity analyses about desalination plants reveal that electricity production and chemical consumption are the most sensitive parameters. Comparative analysis between energy sources used in adsorbent recovery processes and desalination methods indicated that solar energy has the lowest environmental impacts among all kinds of energy scenarios. This study concluded that an alternative sustainable industrial process to obtain uranium is actually applicable and it can be integrated with the desalination plants.

Subject Keywords

Uranium recovery, Life cycle assessment, Solar energy, Amidoximated adsorbent, Desalination

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96819

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Uranium Recovery from Brine Altay, Melike Benan; Kalıpçıoğlu, Ceyda; Kurt, Zöhre (2022-06-01) With the increase in world population and the associated increase in raw material, clean water and energy demands, seeking for innovative and sustainable methods to decrease human-made environmental footprint becomes a task of utmost importance to reduce emissions and waste generation. Uranium-based atomic energy generation has an enormous potential to efficiently supply energy demand at the cost of high environmental impact on water bodies. Therefore, estimating the environmental impacts of the uranium rec...
Development of the algorithm of SOlAR TURnKEY: solar electricity software for Turkey Karaveli, Abdullah Buğrahan; Akınoğlu, Bülent Gültekin; Soytaş, Uğur; Department of Earth System Science (2018) Together with the increase in population, consumption, environmental threats, social inclusion and poverty eradication needs, natural resource corruption and price, rapid electrification of the world necessitates to meet energy demand in the most efficient, economic, environmental and social way. At this point with the sharp decrease in prices, increase in efficiency and development in technology in addition to environmental friendliness and social inclusiveness, solar electricity has gained importance when...
Embodied carbon assessment of residential housing at urban scale Kayaçetin, Nuri Cihan; Tanyer, Ali Murat (2020-01-01) A great majority of the previous research put extensive efforts on the evaluation of life cycle impacts and carbon footprint of single buildings. Analysis on single buildings often excludes components related with urban scale such as construction of infrastructure, distance to city centre and transportation. Research on neighbourhood-scale settlements is necessary to further develop the understanding of the environmental impact of built-environment.
A data-driven approach for predicting solar energy potential of buildings in urban fabric Duran, Ayça; Gürsel Dino, İpek; Department of Architecture (2022-7) Energy-efficient buildings that use clean and sustainable energy sources are urgently needed to reduce the environmental impact of buildings and mitigate climate change in cities. Buildings have great potential in harvesting solar energy by their solar exposure capacity. Developments in PV technologies also encourage the integration of PV systems into architectural applications. However, urban contexts can limit solar energy generation capacity of buildings by shading building envelopes and reducing availab...
Comparison of Frequency Analysis with Density Based Clustering in Evaluating Extreme Streamflows Kentel Erdoğan, Elçin(2018-12-31) Analysis of streamflow data has significant importance concerning sustainable use of water resources, planning supply of short and long term demands. Streamflow, unlike many other completely random variables, is a dependent variable which is closely related to both meteorological (such as precipitation, temperature) and catchment characteristics (such as land use and soil type). Thus inter-dependencies should be taken into consideration while analyzing streamflow. Besides this, while analyzing streamflow da...

Citation Formats

M. B. Altay, “Comparative life cycle assessment of uranium recovery from brine,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.