[ RadSafe ] Diffusion, Uranium and all that

[Joseph Preisig]

Thank You, parthasarathy...

     Joe Preisig



On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 7:37 PM, parthasarathy k s <ksparth at yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:

> Dear Dr.Preisig,
> Thank you very much for the excellent review. I felt like attending one of
> those memorable lectures of Prof Bill Spiers, Department of Medical
> Physics, University of Leeds UK in the 70s!
> When Elezabeth Rona wrote about Madame Curie and her exploits in Health
> Physics journal ["Laboratory Contamination in the Early Period of Radiation
> Research"Health Phys 37(1979):723-7], this writer suggested in a letter to
> the Editor in Health Physics that veteran scientists must pen their memoirs
> for the benefit of the younger generation.Health Physics did publish a
> few.Dr Preisig's review belongs to a different category, equally refreshing
> none the less.
> Best wishes for a happy, productive and prosperous New Year
> Parthasarathy
>
>     On Saturday, 26 December 2015, 9:22, Joseph Preisig <jrpnj01 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>  Dear Radsafe,
>
>     There are a few ways to separate U235 from U238.  Diffusion, laser
> separation, use of Accelerators/calutrons etc.  See the internet for
> diffusion and laser separation.
>
>       Start with Uranium ore.  Chemically or otherwise, separate the
> Uranium from other rock, dirt, impurities.  What you have is Uranium Oxide,
> U3O8, or whatever.  For gaseous diffusion, convert the Uranium to UF6 or
> whatever.
>
>       For accelerator/calutron separation, refer to the book by Livingston
> and Blewett, the internet, or other books.  If one ends up with a bunch of
> U235 and a bunch of U238, think about putting the U238 into a reactor and
> making Plutonium.  This process is described in Nuclear Physics books by
> Kaplan, Segre and so on.  Many nuclear/particle physics grad students
> become competent in these accelerator concepts in grad school.  Sometimes,
> Grad students from China/Taiwan have copies of fundamental physics graduate
> level texts (Goldstein, JD Jackson, Arfken, Matthews and Walker, Schiff,
> etc.) that are in paperback form and were printed in China/Taiwan.
>
>     At ORNL during WW2, some accelerators were used to obtain U235.  These
> were called Calutrons, and from recent movies I have seen on TV, there were
> many Calutrons at ORNL.  Quite an effort.  These calutrons had rather large
> beam pipes, perhaps somewhat like heating ducts in your family home.  There
> were magnets external to the ducts, some for bending the alleged beam and
> some for rather crudely keeping the beam in the beam pipes.  Similar
> accelerators to the Calutron might be the Cosmotron at Brookhaven Lab, and
> the Zero Gradient Synchrotron at Argonne Lab (USA).  One of  the external
> magnets for the Cosmotron used to be outside of the Alternating Gradient
> Synchrotron building (BNL).
>
>     Later on, particle accelerators started to have smaller beampipes and
> started to use the concept of Alternating Gradients (magnets focused beam
> in the horizontal and/or vertical directions as the beam went forward).
> The magnets were electromagnets, and not so much Permanent Magnets.  See
> Livingston and Blewett about all this, (and weak focusing and strong
> focusing).  The Alternating Gradient stuff was developed at Brookhaven Lab,
> and possibly also suggested independently by Christofilos.  Alternating
> Gradient magnets are used in many serious particle accelerators in many
> different countries.  This technology was invented quite a while ago now,
> and is in the public domain.
>
>     So, all I will say now is that one could build a modern accelerator
> using Alternating Gradients, modern magnets etc. to separate U235 from
> 238.  It is all quite do-able and there is nothing secret about it.  Such
> an accelerator would work better than a Calutron.  Clearly, one is using
> the charge to mass ratio to separate U235 from U238.  One can use electric
> fields, magnetic fields and/or both to do the separation.  See E and M
> books by Lorrain and Corson, Reitz and Milford, Kip etc.  Heck a kid in the
> Trenton, NJ area won the Trenton Science Fair by building a mass
> spectrometer in the 1970's.  Nothing new here, but it is interesting and
> fun.
>
>     Joe Preisig
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