Separation of exp 241 Am from Calcium, Lead, and Certain Other Metallic Impurities

摘要

During the decade of the 1970's, the Savannah River Plant (SRP) became a major supplier of exp 241 Am to the Isotope Sales Program of the Department of Energy for use in the preparation of low-gamma background neutron sources useful in petroleum well logging. Contaminants which have been troublesome to the SRP processes have included Ca, Pb, Fe, Cr, Ni, Al, Mg, and Pu. As part of an overall program to upgrade SRP processes, a variety of separation techniques were studied in an effort to arrive at a generic process which would yield both high recovery of exp 241 Am, > 95%, and high purity, > 98% exp 241 AmO sub 2 . Processes studied with and without prior contaminant complexes include solvent extraction, ion exchange, and precipitation. Flowsheets that can be optimized either on processing time or waste generation and that yield a desirable percent recovery and desirably pure product were developed. (ERA citation 06:029105)