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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
M. H. Lloyd
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 17 | Number 3 | November 1963 | Pages 452-456
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE63-A17398
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An anion exchange process for the recovery of americium, curium, and rare earths contained in the waste effluent from plutonium processing has been developed and tested on a laboratory scale. In the process the waste, which is a solution of americium, curium, aluminum, and fission products, in concentrated nitric acid, is concentrated by evaporation until a temperature of 140°C is reached. This removes excess acid, and the proper feed concentration of 2.34 M Al(NO3)3 is obtained by dilution. The americium, curium, and rare earths are sorbed on Dowex 1–10X resin; aluminum is washed from the column with 8 M LiN03; and the americium, curium, and rare earths are eluted with 0.65 M HN03. In laboratory demonstrations of this process made with americium tracer and macro amounts of rare earths, americium losses were undetectable, aluminum decontamination factors were 250, and rare earth concentration in the product was as great as 8.5 gm/liter.