PRODUCTION OF SOME HIGH SPECIFIC ACTIVITY RADIOISOTOPES

Abstract

The thesis entitled "Production of Some High Specific Activity Radioisotopes" comprises three chapters; introduction, experimental, and results and di.scussion. Chapter I, introduction, includes brief accounts on nuclear fission reactions, uranium targets, chemistry of uranium and fission products, chemical separation concepts, review of some fission-products separation procedures, and radiochemical processing plants. Chapter 2, which includes the experimental work, is divided into three main parts: (I) preparation and irradiation of the uranium targets, (2) chemical processing, including (i) digestion of the itTadiated uranium targets, (ii) separation and recovery of radioiodine, (iii) separation and recovery of radioruthenium, (iv) batch separation of Sr, Ba, La, and Ce radionuclides, (v) batch separation of Zr, Nb, Te, and Np radionuclides, (vi) separation and recovery of radiocesium, and (vii) recovery of radiomolybdenum, and (3) quality control investigations of the recovered radioisotopes, including the separation yield, recovery yield, radionuclidic purity, radiochemical purity, and/or pH-value. It includes also a list of chemicals and a description of the equipments and apparatuses used in the present work. Chapter 3 presents results and discussion. When uramum targets

(uranium trioxide and uranyl nitrate hexahydrate) were irradiated in the

22 MW-water-cooled ETRR-2 Research Reactor (Egypt) for 4 h at a thermal neutron flux of I x 10 14 n/cm 2 .s, cooled for one week, and analyzed by y-ray spectroscopy, the following radionuclides were appeared: 95 Zr

(T,.2 64.02 d), 97Zr (T

112

= 16.9 h ), 97mNb (T ,'

= 58.1 s), 97 Nh

(T1 /2 1.23 h), 99Mo (T112 = 2.75 d), 99"'Tc (T

112

= 6.01 h), 101Ru

(T12 = 39.27 d),

1311 (T = 8.04 d),

112

1 (T1il= 2.28 h),

132Te (T 112 = 3.26 d),