Adsorption of cesium from aqueous solution using chitosan beads

Abstract

Due to rapid population growth, technological advancement and industrial revolution, the rate of generated waste effluents has become a grave concern. Cesium, which possesses high fission yield, is generally transferred into liquid wastes, especially those emanated from nuclear power plants, reprocessing of spent fuels, nuclear weapon testing, and radionuclides production facilities for medical applications. Radiocesium (137Cs) is one of the hazardous radionuclides which have adverse effects on human health and the environment. Thus, from a health point of view, the removal of cesium from wastewater is imperative. Several techniques have been introduced as solution, and recently, adsorption has been gaining increasing attention among the scientific community owing to a number of reasons. Hence, this research presents an experimental work on sorption of cesium from wastewaters. In this study, chitosan was used as an adsorbent. The effects of several critical parameters, namely contact time, initial concentration, and absorbent dosage on the absorbent performance were investigated. From the findings, the optimum condition for the adsorption of cesium was optimized at pH 1 at 300 mg/L for 5 hours of contact time. The sorption data fitted well with Freundlich adsorption model, with the value of R2 = 0.9940, and was best described by pseudo-first-order model with the value of correlation coefficient, R2 = 0.9952.