Growing concern over the hazardous effect of radionuclides on the environment is driving research on mitigation and deposition strategies for radioactive waste management. Currently, there are many techniques used for radionuclides separation from the environment such as ion exchange, solvent extraction, chemical precipitation and adsorption. Adsorbents are the leading area of research and many useful materials are being discovered in this category of radionuclide ion separation. The adsorption technologies lack the ability of selective removal of metal ions from solution. This drawback is eliminated by the use of ion-imprinted polymers, these materials having targeted binding sites for specific ions in the media. In this review article, we present recently published literature about the use of ion-imprinted polymers for the adsorption of 10 important hazardous radionuclides—U, Th, Cs, Sr, Ce, Tc, La, Cr, Ni, Co—found in the nuclear fuel cycle.

Contamination of water with organic dyes is a major environmental concern as it causes serious life-threatening environmental problems. The present research was designed to evaluate the potential of three different natural inorganic clays (NICs) i.e., Pakistani bentonite clay (PB), bentonite purchased from Alfa Aesar (BT), and Turkish red mud (RM) for malachite green (MG) dye removal from an aqueous solution. Various analytical techniques, namely X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF), X-ray diffractometry (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), Brunauer–Emmett–Teller surface area measurement (BET), and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), were used to investigate the physicochemical properties of the NICs samples. The effect of adsorption operational parameters such as contact time, aqueous phase pH, dye concentration, and amount of NICs on the adsorption behavior of MG onto NICs samples were investigated under the batch adsorption system. The equilibrium and kinetic inspection reflected the best description of MG adsorption behavior by the Langmuir isotherm model and pseudo-first-order kinetic model, respectively. The results indicated that the adsorption was favorable at higher pH. The maximum adsorption capacities calculated by Langmuir isotherm for PB, BT, and RM were found to be 243.90 mg/g, 188.68 mg/g, and 172.41 mg/g, respectively. It can be concluded that natural inorganic clays with a higher surface area can be used as an effective adsorbent material to remove the MG dye from an aqueous solution.

In this work, highly crystalline CdS nanorods (NRs) were successfully synthesized by a facile, one-step solvothermal method. The as-prepared CdS NRs powder was characterized by XRD, FESEM, Raman, PL, XPS, BET, and UV-visible techniques to evaluate the structural, morphological, and optical properties. The photocatalytic performance of the as-synthesized CdS NRs was investigated for the photodegradation of RhB dye under visible light irradiations. It has been found that CdS NRs show maximum RhB degradation efficiency of 88.4% in 120 min. The excellent photodegradation ability of the CdS NRs can be attributed to their rod-like structure together with their large surface area and surface state. The kinetic study indicated that the photodegradation process was best described by the pseudo-first-order kinetic model. The possible mechanism for the photodegradation of RhB dye over CdS NRs was proposed in this paper.