Enriched 146Nd recovery from a 147Pm production process by applying ion imprinting technique

Abstract

A neodymium-imprinted polymeric sorbent was synthesized to recover the enriched 146Nd-target material from 147Pm production process. The studies indicated the neodymium (III) adsorption capacity of 1.5 mg g−\u20091. 146Nd-oxide was irradiated in Tehran Research Reactor to produce 147Pm. Then, the prepared Nd-selective sorbent was applied to recover the macro-gram amounts of 146Nd from a micro-gram amount of 147Pm. Regarding the high efficiency of leaching process (> 96%), the remaining natural Nd-ions trapped in polymer structure caused an acceptable slight down-blending of the target material. The sorbent with 146Nd was burned with a heat-gun to produce 146Nd2O3 for the next experiments.