Educational Laboratory Experiments on Chemistry in a Nuclear Engineering School

An educational laboratory experiment on radiochemistry was investigated by students in the general course of the Nuclear Engineering School of Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. Most of them are not chemical engineers, but electrical and mechanical engineers. Therefore, the educational experiment was designed for them by introducing a “word experiment” in the initial stage and by reducing the chemical procedure as far as possible. It began with calculations on a simple solvent extraction process—the “word experiment”—followed by the chemical separation of ¹⁴⁴Pr from ¹⁴⁴Ce with tri-n-butyl phosphate in a nitric acid system and then measurement of the radioactive decay and growth of the separated ¹⁴⁴Pr and ¹⁴⁴Ce, respectively. The chemical procedure was explained by the phenomenon but not by the mechanism of chelation. Most students thought the experiment was an exercise in solvent extraction or radiochemical separation rather than a radioactive equilibrium experiment. However, a pure chemist considered it as a sort of physical experiment, where the chemical procedure was used only for preparation of measuring samples. Another experiment, where ¹³⁷Cs was measured after isolation with ammonium phosphomolybdate, was also investigated. The experiment eliminated the need for students who were not chemists to know how to use radioactive tracers. These students appreciated the realization that they could understand the radioactivity in the environmental samples in a chemical frame of reference even though they were not chemists.