The sustainable expansion of nuclear power hinges on securing uranium supply and managing radioactive wastewater, yet conventional recovery methods suffer from low capacity, poor selectivity, and sluggish kinetics. Piezocatalysis offers a promising alternative, but its efficacy in single‐phase materials is restricted by the piezoelectric screening effect. Herein, we construct a zinc oxide@zinc selenide (ZnO@ZnSe) heterojunction as a high‐performance piezocatalyst for ultrasound‐stimulated uranium recovery. A spontaneous interfacial built‐in electric field with a ZnO‐to‐ZnSe orientation is established at the heterojunction, which actively mitigates the potential screening effect and amplifies the piezoelectric polarization. Consequently, the optimized ZnO@ZnSe‐10 delivers an excellent uranium uptake capacity of 1372.7 mg·g −1 , high extraction selectivity, and good cycling stability. Mechanistic investigations elucidate a hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 )‐mediated piezocatalytic cascade: piezoelectrons convert dissolved oxygen (O 2 ) to superoxide radicals (•O 2 − ), whose disproportionation generates in situ H 2 O 2 that oxidatively precipitates soluble hexavalent uranyl ions (UO 2 2+ ) as insoluble crystalline uranyl peroxide hydrates ((UO 2 )O 2 ·2H 2 O and UO 3 ·2H 2 O). Density functional theory (DFT) calculations further confirm that the interfacial electric field lowers the thermodynamic barrier for key oxygen‐containing intermediates, thereby promoting sustained H 2 O 2 production for uranium recovery. This work establishes a general strategy to overcome the piezoelectric screening effect, providing a feasible strategy for high‐efficiency uranium extraction.
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Li et al. (2026) studied this question.
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