The Yield Study of Chemical Separation for the Thorium and Uranium Isotopes from Sea Sediments

Chemical separation methods of thorium and uranium isotopes from Ocean sediment samples have been studied in this work intensively. Following the separation of thorium isotopes by cation exchange resin from 3N-HCl solution, the uranium isotopes were extracted into mesityl oxide from 1N-HN0_3 solution satulated with LiN0_3 as a saltingout reagent. The uranium isotopes were then stripped into disthlled water and extracted again with TTA-benzen solution (0.2M TTA) adjusting the pH of the aqueous phase to 3.2 and by adding EDTA as a masking reagent. To study the chemical yield for entire separation techniques, the Th-234 and U-232 isotopes as tracers were added to the sample solution. The uranium isotopes were recovered from the samples by 56.7% on the average, ranging from 32% to 79% for six samples, and the thorium isotopes were recovered by 86.7% with which agrees well for Th-separations in the works reported by other investigators. The isotopes separated were determined by the ordinally alphaspectrometric method with the use of 200 channel pulse height analyzer and silicon surface barrier detector