Water–gas shift reaction (WGSR) is one of the most important industrial processes for removing carbon monoxide impurity in hydrogen feedstock in ammonia synthesis, stream reforming of methanol and glycerol, and for adjusting the CO/H2 ratio in syngas feeds [1,2]. Two types of industrial catalysts have been commercially available for this reaction: a high-temperature iron-based catalyst and a low-temperature copper-based catalyst. In recent years, many attentions have been paid to using supported gold catalysts for WGSR. Most of them makes great struggle to improve its catalytic activity and understand the fundamental aspects related to the na- tures of active gold sites, role of support, and reaction mechanism [3–8]. It is known that the catalytic performance of gold catalyst depends highly on size and shape of gold nanoparticles, reducible property of oxide support, gold-oxide interface interactions, and so on. Andreeva et al. first used Au/α-Fe2O3 catalyst for WGSR and found that its activity is comparable with that of a conventional cop- per catalyst [9,10]. Fu et al. reported subsequently that Au/CeO2 cat- alyst had higher activity than other oxides-supported gold catalysts [11–13]. The good reducibility of and high oxygen storage of ceria as well as a perturbation of the lattice constant of ceria caused by the diffusion of Au ions into ceria were considered to be responsible for its high activity [14–16]. Obviously, the selection of an efficient support is a decisive factor to provide good catalytic performance.
Uranium is an actinide element with six valence electrons. The ability to attain high coordination numbers makes it as a promising catalytic