Investigetion of the thorium leaching conditions from ore with ammonium oxalate

One of the most important deposits of thorium on the world is situated in the Eskişehir-Beylikahır region of Turkey. The thorium and rare earths ore is a complex bastneasit mineral including calcite, barite and fluorite. The ore contains 380000 tons of ThO2 and 4,5 million tons of rare earth Elements. The different studies performed up to now weren't economically achieved to take thorium into the solution from ore. In this study, unlike the classical methods, dissolution of thorium was carried out with ammonium oxalate. Dissolution conditions of thorium from ore, were optimized such as; 1M oxalic acid concentration (pH adjusted to 3.5 with ammonium hydroxide), temperature as 100°C, solid/liquid ratio as 1/20 and leaching time as 1 hour and under this conditions thorium was taken selectively into the solution with a 98±2 % efficiency.