Talk:Isotope separation

Removed text and other quibbles
Removed text:

Centrifuges have a smaller throughput than diffusion plants and therefore may require many centrifuges operating in parallel to process large amounts of material.

In fact, diffusion cells operate in even bigger (larger numbers of cells) cascades, with many cells in parallel at the lower concentrations. The other thing is that centrifuges vary in size... the American ones appear to be a lot bigger than the European ones (although the rotor sizes are still secret). Andrewa 20:29, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

A minor quibble: strictly speaking, evaporation is a physical rather than a chemical process, so that should come under physical methods. I believe that there are some quite large-scale isotope enrichments carried out using differences in boiling points. The company Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, (if I recall correctly from a catalogue of theirs I saw a decade or so ago), does fractional distillation of carbon dioxide to enrich the C-13 over C-12. But that catalogue was a long time ago, and I can't find any definite information on their current website about how they do their isotope production, though I note their newsletter describes their O-18 production method as distillation:  -- Malcolm Farmer 21:31, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)


 * That's a good point. The chemical process I had in mind was electrical disassociation, which is the older method of preparation of heavy water. The article still suffers from wikitus (disorder resulting from mixing styles, thought processes and levels of understanding of several authors into a single inconsistent prose), please feel free to clarify!


 * I wasn't aware of commercial availability of C-13 or O-18 enriched products, please add them. A pity, that means my neat generalisation is no longer true and will have to go too! But we should have accuracy rather than art! Andrewa 06:10, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Which elements are separated at commercial levels
"To date large-scale commercial isotope separation has occurred of only three elements."

Any source for this claim? I know of at least one other, Boron, as boron-10 is preferable to boron-11 as a neutron absorber for use as a reactor posion in nuclear fuel. 136.159.234.163 21:22, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

He3 is often separated from He4 for cryogenic research, usually by their different boiling point (3K vs. 4K) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ejeffrey (talk • contribs) 13:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)


 * To my knowledge, the world market for 13C is around 40 kg/year, more than half for medical use (see 13C breath test). Is this a large quantity? Some other elements are used also in kg/year quantities. Dolorpiedo (talk) 18:02, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Centripetal/ Centrifugal
I changed Centripetal to Centrifugal because:

1. Less confusion with the way things are named.

2. The difference is basically only which way you are facing.

3. The only reason I could see to use centripetal to begin with was intellectual snobbery.

=== Problem with dating.

The following statement from the article has a problem in that the Manhattan project was during WWII, which was definately not before 1936.

"The centrifugal separation of isotopes was first suggested by Aston and Lindemann[2] in 1919 but attempts to use the technology during the Manhattan project were unproductive and not until 1936 were the first successful experiments reported by Beams and Haynes[3] on isotopes of chlorine." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.167.89.139 (talk) 16:15, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Removed inaccurate text
which will also require enriched uranium as a fuel describing plutonium production reactors. Ummm, sorry, that's complete and utter rubbish. For example, the UK, France, and North Korea (and probably others, I don't know the details) all produced their first plute bombs using natural uranium fueled, graphite moderated reactors. No isotopic separation required, that's the atraction of that technology. Andrewa (talk) 13:34, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

this is a B article?
just what theory of Charles Townes is being talked about in the intro?76.218.104.120 (talk) 04:41, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I removed it. The statement was unsourced, unclear, and most likely elaborating further about a field where isotope separation is not used, so undue in the lede of this article. &mdash;&thinsp; H HHIPPO  08:17, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
 * that's an improvement, but this is still below the quality of a B article.76.218.104.120 (talk) 13:28, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
 * cancel that, the intro colored my opinion. This article isn't so bad.76.218.104.120 (talk) 13:30, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Separated lead
Pb-208 has an even lower neutron capture cross section than natural lead, and other more subtle nuclear properties that have led to it being called the ultimate fast reactor coolant, and it's also interesting for other classes of reactor.

http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/28075.pdf has some details (but not that exact quote, that's from my father Keith Alder who was a nuclear engineer and very interested in lead coolants).

So when nuclear engineers speak of separated lead they generally mean lead enriched in Pb-208. Or rather, lead rich in Pb-208, since it's most easily obtained from Thorium ores (up to 90% Pb-208) which means it's neither enriched nor separated, strictly speaking.

The book Application of Stable Lead Isotope Pb-208 in Nuclear Power Engineering and its Acquisition Techniques would be another good source. Andrewa (talk) 01:53, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

Additional methods perhaps
There is perhaps room for fleshing out the types, might not matter after re-reading.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/u-aerodynamic.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helikon_vortex_separation_process I see this is already mentioned here even though aerodynamic is lumped with centrifugal.

Idyllic press (talk) 23:01, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

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9.54
In the chemical methods section, three constants of value 9.54 seems to have different ratios? Gah4 (talk) 08:46, 7 July 2023 (UTC)