Difference between revisions of "Isotope separation"

Revision as of 16:38, 12 March 2015

Sorting atoms by mass shouldn't be a hard problem for advanced AP systems. Single molecules have already be weighted with tuning forks of todays (2014) technology. A question is how much throughput will be possible.

Methods for determining the mass:

• Tuning fork detuning
• deflection in E & B fields densly packed mass spectrometers (Wikipedia: [1])
• necessary centripetal force while spinning

Nuclear excitations can have low energies way below the mass equivalent of one whole nucleone. Thus there is the question how fine small high throughput mass detection sensors will resolve mass.

The capability of filtering for radioactive isotopes:

• is nice cleaning air when there's contamination for whatever reason (evaporating and splitting dust particles, capturing radon gas?)
• poses considerable security risks due to the emerging high level radiation sorces that can potentially arrive at a critical mass BOOM! The high dilutedness of natural radioactivity may make that unpractically long but there are easily accessible unnatural sources like thorium dioxide glasses (²³²Th not ²²⁹Th though - no critical mass here) .

Prime suspects for filtering is Radon - a noble gas. ¹⁴C and stuff from nuclear fission accidents like iodine-131, caesium-134 and caesium-137 accumulate in dust (?) they are easy to filter but harder to enrich.

Speculative applications

Creating ultra low radiation environments. By enriching non radioactive isotopes and using exclusively those to build up AP systems one can get rid of internal radiation sources. To get rid of high energy radiation coming from outside (Wikipedia: [2]) big scale isolation facilities may be used. Mountains or in the extreme whole asteroids. There will still be particles penetrating like e.g. neutrinos. Related would be systems for the creation of unprecedented low temperatures to search for yet unkown aspects of physics.

ultra high isolation experiments