RMI Nuclear Justice Documents

the residual stuff, you do the same thing again.
it, let it sit overnight, and work.

Pour the acid in, heat

You do this four times.

At the end of

the fourth time, you have a white, I don't know what to call it, residual

Supposedly this has nothing else of interest in

_soil, a white mess here.
it and it's discarded.

In the middle steps that I told you about, you need

to separate the plutonium from the other material that was leached out with
the acid.

This is a key step.

glass tubes in the

background,

This is the resin columns.
are

loaded

with

a

resin

These columns,
which

has

an

affinity for plutonium so that you pour your liquid through there, and the

10 plutonium is absorbed on the resin, and nothing else, and then you can pour
1 some material in _tt—which will release the plutonium and you will have a
12 solution which has, effectively, only plutonium in it.
We come to the Last step and this is the electroplating apparatus.
13
14 The plutonium liquid is poured: into these little glass vials, here's one,
15 here's one, here's one. Theplatinum disk is at the bottom of the vial.
16 It's sort of held on with a rubber -cover so that the platinum is effective17 ly part of the vial. There is a platinum electrode that comes down from
18 here, from here, goes down into the liquid and an electric current is kept
19 between the two electrodes so that the platinum ions are electroplated on
20 the bottom surface. This takes on the orderof 5-6 hours, and we can do a
21 number of samples at once. The little platinum disks are these shiny
22 things that look like they are surrounded by the gold here. One here,
23 here, here and here. That is what the sample itself looks like after the
24 chemistry is done, and this gadget is the counter-which does the alpha
25 spectroscopy. The detectors themselves are the gold gadgets, here and
26 here, that look up and the planchets are put face downover the detector
27 and the detector can rotate under them so that we can count. This is an
28

automatic sample changer.

We can count a number of them without human

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