Talk:Isotope separation

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Centrifuges have a smaller throughput than diffusion plants and therefore may require many centrifuges operating in parallel to process large amounts of material.

In fact, diffusion cells operate in even bigger (larger numbers of cells) cascades, with many cells in parallel at the lower concentrations. The other thing is that centrifuges vary in size... the American ones appear to be a lot bigger than the European ones (although the rotor sizes are still secret). Andrewa 20:29, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

A minor quibble: strictly speaking, evaporation is a physical rather than a chemical process, so that should come under physical methods. I believe that there are some quite large-scale isotope enrichments carried out using differences in boiling points. The company Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, (if I recall correctly from a catalogue of theirs I saw a decade or so ago), does fractional distillation of carbon dioxide to enrich the C-13 over C-12. But that catalogue was a long time ago, and I can't find any definite information on their current website about how they do their isotope production, though I note their newsletter describes their O-18 production method as distillation: [1] -- Malcolm Farmer 21:31, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)