Radioactivity and mineralogical studies with an emphasis on recovery of thorium from mylonite rocks in the Abu Rusheid a
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(2020) 5:45
ORIGINAL PAPER
Radioactivity and mineralogical studies with an emphasis on recovery of thorium from mylonite rocks in the Abu Rusheid area, South Eastern Desert, Egypt Mohamed Salem Kamar1 · Ahmed Rabea Bakry1 · Lamia Abdelrahman Yousef1 · Doaa Anwar Mostafa1 Received: 14 December 2019 / Accepted: 5 July 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The Abu Rusheid area, part of the Arabian-Nubian Shield, lies about 90 km southwest of Marsa Alam City. The cataclastic rocks in this area include protomylonites, mylonites, ultramylonites, and silicified ultramylonites. Mylonite rocks make up about 65.0% by volume of the cataclastic rocks, and many of them have high concentrations of visible orange-colored thorium and yellow-colored uranium minerals. XRD and SEM analyses revealed the presence of thorite, kasolite, monazite, zircon, xenotime, hematite, and ilmenite. The mylonite rock studied here contained high concentrations of thorium: > 1% in some cases, and an average of 3962 ppm. A sample assaying 10,000 mg/L was leached at 50 °C for 1.5 h by 6 M HCl using a S/L ratio of 1/6, which dissolved about 95% of the thorium. The thorium was precipitated from the leach liquor by oxalic acid. Highly pure thorium oxide was then prepared and identified via qualitative (SEM/EDX) and quantitative (ICP-OES) analyses. Keywords Abu Rusheid · Thorium · Recovery · Mylonite · Mineralogy · Egypt
Introduction The Arabian-Nubian Shield covers an area of about two million square kilometers on both sides of the Red Sea, and is defined by the limiting exposure of basement rocks beneath the extensive cover of undeformed Paleozoic strata in Sinai, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The Nubian Shield is the Precambrian basement in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, parts of Uganda and Kenya, and the northern coast of Somalia. The ArabianNubian Shield developed between about 1100 and 540 Ma (Delfour 1980; Greenwood 1981; Vail et al. 1984; Stoeser and Camp 1985). Communicated by Mohamed Ksibi, Co-Editor in Chief. * Ahmed Rabea Bakry [email protected] Mohamed Salem Kamar [email protected] Lamia Abdelrahman Yousef [email protected] Doaa Anwar Mostafa [email protected] 1
Nuclear Materials Authority, P.O. Box 530, El Maadi, Cairo, Egypt
Stern and Hedge (1985) subdivided the Eastern Desert of Egypt into three sectors: the North Eastern Desert (NED), the Central Eastern Desert (CED), and the South Eastern Desert (SED), based on distinct changes in geological style. The area studied in the present work lies at the boundary between the CED and the SED. It is delimited by the latitudes 24°36′29″N and 24°39′22″N and the longitudes 34°44′40″E and 34°47′23″E, is about 90 km southwest of Marsa Alam City in the South Eastern Desert, and is accessible from the Red Sea through the Wadi El-Gemal desert track (Fig. 1). Thorium, one of the most important radioactive elements, is widely distributed in the Earth’s crust (Wang et al. 2013; Akbari-Jeyhouni et al. 2018; Ding et al. 2019; Zhou et al. 2019). It is extensively used in various applica
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