AW: [ RadSafe ] Re: radioactive contamination of silver

[Franz Schönhofer]

Mark and RADSAFErs,

That Po-210 must be present in ores of Cu-U-Au-Ag mining is not
surprising. That the various procedures of refining of gold, silver and
electrolytic refinement of copper which involves several meltings and
electrotechnical processes would not remove Po-210 is more than
surprising. A very common method to separate and determine Po-210 is
based on the volatilisation of Po-210. Therefore I draw the conclusion
that traditional methods for silver production should simply by the fact
of melting remove any contamination attributable to Po-210. 

I am of course open to any explanation showing that this is not the
case.

Franz

Franz Schoenhofer
PhD, MR iR
Habicherg. 31/7
A-1160 Vienna
AUSTRIA
phone -43-0699-1168-1319


> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl] Im
> Auftrag von sontermj at tpg.com.au
> Gesendet: Freitag, 25. März 2005 11:51
> An: radsafe at radlab.nl
> Betreff: [ RadSafe ] Re: radioactive contamination of silver
> 
> Regarding the thread on contamination of silver:
> 
> Can I suggest that an often-unrecognised pathway for silver to get
> contaminated with radionuclides is from
> usually-tiny amounts of NORM in the silver ore that can carry over
into
> the final refinery process.  At a
> Copper-Uranium-Gold-Silver mining and processing facility where I was
once
> the RSO, we had to hold
> back the initial silver shipments because we had found unexpected
Po-210
> contamination in it (and Kodak
> didnt want it!).  We made adjustments to the metallurgical process to
> reduce this carry over.
> 
> Mark Sonter
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