With the recent commissioning of the Facility for Rare Ion Beams (FRIB), the development of chemical procedures for harvesting radioisotopes that will be produced at this facility is of interest for many areas of research including astrophysics, stockpile stewardship and medical isotope production. This talk with address on-going R&D efforts at LLNL to develop chemical procedures for harvesting radioisotopes from aqueous and solid materials at FRIB. Solid harvesting will largely focus on long-lived radioisotopes that accumulate in materials such as beam stops or mass slits during operation. One such isotope is 172Hf (t1/2 = 1.9 years), which is created in the W-alloy beam stops used at the NSCL and FRIB. Hafnium-172 is the parent isotope of 172Lu (t1/2 = 6.7 d), which is of interest for many research applications, including perturbed angle correlation (PAC) studies, a radiochemical diagnostic for stockpile stewardship and, potentially, as a medical radioisotope. A procedure for the separation of trace hafnium from a bulk tungsten alloy (454 g) was established using tracer isotopes (175Hf, 88Zr, 173Lu, 88Y). The procedure has a high yield for Hf (90 ± 8%) with a Hf/W separation factor &gt;109 and a purity that meets or exceeds medical isotope standards for all elements except Fe, which was present as an impurity in the W-alloy. Zirconium follows hafnium quantitatively in this procedure; there was no detectable rare earth elements in the final sample. Further research efforts focus on the aqueous harvesting of 73Se and its daughter 73As, which is of interest for nuclear data studies as well as a tracer isotope for radiopharmaceutical research. The preliminary results for a procedure for the isolation, and subsequent separation, of these elements from an aqueous system will be discussed.

Development of chemical procedures for isotope harvesting at FRIB: 172Hf and 73As/73Se

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