Separation of Lanthanides and Trivalent Actinides with Pressurized Ion Exchange

Abstract

Abstract Certainly, one of the first triumphs of ion exchange chromatography was the separation and identification of fission product rare earths in the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s. Publications describing this work were withheld until 1947 when nine papers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University appeared simultaneously in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.2–10 This work revolutionized the purification and production of rare earths because the separations were relatively rapid (requiring only hours to days, compared with years using classical methods) and, for the first time, small amounts of material, even tracer levels, could be separated.