Talk:Isotope separation

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Centrifuges have a smaller throughput than diffusion plants and therefore may require many centrifuges operating in parallel to process large amounts of material.

In fact, diffusion cells operate in even bigger (larger numbers of cells) cascades, with many cells in parallel at the lower concentrations. The other thing is that centrifuges vary in size... the American ones appear to be a lot bigger than the European ones (although the rotor sizes are still secret). Andrewa 20:29, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

A minor quibble: strictly speaking, evaporation is a physical rather than a chemical process, so that should come under physical methods. I believe that there are some quite large-scale isotope enrichments carried out using differences in boiling points. The company Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, (if I recall correctly from a catalogue of theirs I saw a decade or so ago), does fractional distillation of carbon dioxide to enrich the C-13 over C-12. But that catalogue was a long time ago, and I can't find any definite information on their current website about how they do their isotope production, though I note their newsletter describes their O-18 production method as distillation: [1] -- Malcolm Farmer 21:31, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That's a good point. The chemical process I had in mind was electrical disassociation, which is the older method of preparation of heavy water. The article still suffers from wikitus (disorder resulting from mixing styles, thought processes and levels of understanding of several authors into a single inconsistent prose), please feel free to clarify!

I wasn't aware of commercial availability of C-13 or O-18 enriched products, please add them. A pity, that means my neat generalisation is no longer true and will have to go too! But we should have accuracy rather than art! Andrewa 06:10, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Which elements are separated at commercial levels

"To date large-scale commercial isotope separation has occurred of only three elements."

Any source for this claim? I know of at least one other, Boron, as boron-10 is preferable to boron-11 as a neutron absorber for use as a reactor posion in nuclear fuel. 136.159.234.163 21:22, 22 June 2006 (UTC)