Examples of Leaching Practices

A few examples of leaching practice are presented with die aim of illustrating types of leaching processes rather than an extensive treatise of current practice. The general outline of ore types presented earlier will he followed. 

By far the most important use of amine salt extractants is in the recovery of uranium from acidic leach liquors. The basic process was developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA,195 and essentially similar processes are currently in operation throughout the world. Examples of plant practice in the USA,196 Canada,197 Australia,198 South Africa199 200 and South West Africa201 have been described. 

In contrast, the selective dissolution or leaching-out by corrosion of one component of a single-phase alloy is of considerable practical importance. The most common example of this phenomenon, which is also referred to as parting , is dezincification, i.e. the selective removal of zinc from brass (see Section 1.6). Similar phenomena are observed in other binary copper-base alloys, notably Cu-Al, as well as in other alloy systems. 

In most unit operations it is of considerable importance that material is transferred from one phase to another across a boundary. The transfer of material from a solid phase to a liquid phase (as typically in leaching), or the transfer of material between one liquid phase to another liquid phase (as typically in molten metal and molten slag phases), extraction or between liquid and vapor phases (as typically in distillation) are well-known examples encountered in practice. 

In the case of molten salts, the functional electrolytes are generally oxides or halides. As examples of the use of oxides, mention may be made of the electrowinning processes for aluminum, tantalum, molybdenum, tungsten, and some of the rare earth metals. The appropriate oxides, dissolved in halide melts, act as the sources of the respective metals intended to be deposited cathodically. Halides are used as functional electrolytes for almost all other metals. In principle, all halides can be used, but in practice only fluorides and chlorides are used. Bromides and iodides are thermally unstable and are relatively expensive. Fluorides are ideally suited because of their stability and low volatility, their drawbacks pertain to the difficulty in obtaining them in forms free from oxygenated ions, and to their poor solubility in water. It is a truism that aqueous solubility makes the post-electrolysis separation of the electrodeposit from the electrolyte easy because the electrolyte can be leached away. The drawback associated with fluorides due to their poor solubility can, to a large extent, be overcome by using double fluorides instead of simple fluorides. Chlorides are widely used in electrodeposition because they are readily available in a pure form and... 

Amine extraction in the Kerr-McGee mill. As a practical example of the use of organic amines to extract uranium from leach liquors, a description will be given of the solvent extraction section of the Kerr-McGee uranium mill, whose leaching section was described in Sec. 8.5 of this chapter [M3, H4]. The solvent extraction plant consists of two similar circuits process conditions approximating those of one circuit are shown in Fig. 5.9. 

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