A rapid chemical separation procedure for the determination of burn-up of nuclear fuel

Quantitative separation of samarium from neodymium by anion exchange chromatography in dilute nitric acid-methanol

“…Our experiments showed that on elution of 0.5 mmol of samarium with 0.01 M nitric acid containing 90% methanol the samarium peak was substantially lower and wider than that on elution with 0.06 M nitric acid containing 85% methanol, though the separation factor was even larger. Figures 1 and 2 demonstrate the increase in the separation factor (from about 3.5 to 5) and in the quality of separation, when decreasing the nitric acid concentration from 1 to 0.06 M with the appropriate concentration of methanol to obtain a distribution coefficient of about 12. Figure 3 shows that by using a higher distribution coefficient for samarium (about [15][16][17][18][19][20] a very wide gap between the samarium and neodymium peaks can be obtained. This can be useful when small amounts of samarium have to be separated from very large amounts of neodymium and the lighter lanthanides.…”

“…In addition, some recent work which was developed for the separation of neodymium prior to its determination by isotope dilution mass spectrometry to establish the burn up rates of nuclear fuel also makes use of anion exchange in nitric acidmethanol mixtures (13)(14)(15). In some cases HPLC methods were used (16)(17)(18). All these methods were developed for the partial separation of microor nanogram amounts of neodymium and are not aimed at nor do they provide a quantitative separation of larger amounts of neodymium and samarium.…”