Recent advances in isotope separation. Uranium enrichment and tritium separation by chemical exchange and plasma separation

Isotope separation effect for uranium by chemical exchange had been found to be too small for practical applications. However, Japan developed recently a promising uranium enrichment process based on chemical exchange, which is an ion exchange reaction between uranous ion in an anion resin bed and uranyl ion in solution. Development of a water-hydrogen exchange process has been eagerly anticipated as technology for large scale separation of tritium. This paper reviews recent studies which have resulted in the development of highly active hydrophobic platinum catalysts. The research concerning isotope separation in plasma has been in progress. In this area two schemes - plasma rotation and ion cyclotron resonance - show the most promising results. However, one cannot presently be sure that these methods will lead to an economical large scale separation, because the physics is more complex than that involved in other separation techniques