Leaching of rare earths from bauxite residue (red mud)
The leaching process with dilute HNO 3 was performed at pilot scale and optimized for the extraction of scandium from bauxite residue ( OchsenkühnPetropoulou et al., 2002 ). Xue et al. (2010) found that at a reaction temperature of 90 °C and an L/S ratio of 3:1, over 80% of the scandium in bauxite residue could be leached by H 2 SO 4.