Molybdate Anion‐Doped Porous Electrodes with Oxygen‐Bridging Mode for Efficient Electroreduction of Uranium(Vl)
Abstract The electroreduction of uranyl ions from seawater is a promising and sustainable method to smelt uranium (U) for the nuclear power industry. However, electrostatic repulsion prevents conventional catalytic centers in terms of nanoparticles and cations from making full contact with uranyl ions, leading to poor uranium extraction performance of the electrode materials. Herein, molybdate anions serving as electronegative catalytic centers are integrated into a porous aromatic framework to obtain the porous electrode (Mo@PAF‐6). The metalate anions in Mo@PAF‐6 bind U(VI) cations in the form of Mo─O─U bonds; since the relative distance is limited in the range of 3−4 Å, U(VI) is electrically reduced to U(V) and precipitated as charge‐neutral species. Mo@PAF‐6 outperforms conventional catalysts with electropositive metal centers by 100% for uranium extraction in an 8 ppm uranium‐spiked solution. Moreover, the uranium extraction capacity of Mo@PAF‐6 in real seawater reaches 24.21 mg g −1 during 56 days‐contact, far exceeding that of the classical poly(amidoxime)‐based electrode by a factor of ≈12 000.
Authors
- Liping Wen
- Ye Yuan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0298-2023)
- Guangshan Zhu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5794-3822)
- Shusen Chen
- Hongjuan Ma (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8160-7194)
- Wanying Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8650-4888)
- Fengju Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4521-3696)
- Yajie Yang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9990-117X)
- Xiangyu Kong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7083-9600)
- Yuebing Zheng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9168-9477)
- Weixu Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6915-6081)
- Yingbo Song
- Yan Song (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3386-8335)
- Yi Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8023-2586)
- Cheng Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4857-7995)
- Jiarui Cao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3685-0925)
- Doudou Cao
Institutions
- Shanghai University (CN)
- Northeast Normal University (CN)
- Jilin University (CN)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (CN)
- Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry (CN)
- Tsinghua University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Advanced Functional Materials
- Published
- 2025-07-04
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202509223
- Citations
- 4
- Primary Topic
- Radioactive element chemistry and processing
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 2.15
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- National Key Research and Development Program of China
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities