U235 from day old uranium

[Geoff]

I’ve been recovering from a mild case of Covid. I’m fully vaccinated so I never got seriously ill, but still had to stay home from work for 10 days. Boredom led me to dig out my hydrometallurgy supplies and do a carbonate extraction on some uranium ore I collected this past summer. The ore is uraninite with tyuyamunite and uranospinite among other non-U minerals. I went with a straight forward carbonate extraction since I don’t have ventilation set up to deal with a hydrochloric acid initial extraction. I milled 150 grams of ore to -60 mesh and oxidized it with peroxide and hematite/pyrolusite from a mine near where the uranium came from. I think the hipsters would approve of my ‘locally sourced’ reagents. After a couple hours in the peroxide I added a 4:1 mix of sodium carbonate/sodium bicarbonate and cooked it for 48 hours at 95 C. After the carbonate extraction was complete I filtered the solution then neutralized the liquor with hydrochloric acid, then boiled it for a couple hours to drive off dissolved carbon dioxide before precipitating the uranium with ammonia. The precipitate was filtered, dried and weighed in at 2.3 grams. By skipping the initial acid extraction I ended up with some additional transition metals in the final product, mostly vanadium. In order to purify the yellowcake I washed it in 100 ml of water and 20 ml of hydrochloric acid. The slurry was filtered and the clarified liquor was again precipitated with ammonia yielding 1 gram of yellowcake for a total of almost 0.7 grams of uranium.

I ran a spectrum on the final product and it showed pure U235 as expected. I wanted to see how my math skills were holding up these days so I calculated the mass of the U235 in my yellowcake based on specific activity. A bunch of scribbling later I came up with 0.00035 grams of U235 which should equate to 0.5 grams of U238. I think my results were pretty good considering I didn’t take any factors like self shielding and the small geometry of my well detector into account.

Here is a shortwave UV image of the ore showing Manganoan Calcite (pink/orange) with Uranospinite (green) and Hydrozincite (blue).

Here is the initial product, full of transition metal impurities.

Here is the final filtration.

And here is the final product along with the spectrum.

[Geoff]

I should add that the ore I ground up was a different piece than the one pictured. I brought back a couple kilograms of material and chose from the less aesthetic material to mill.

[Sesselmann]

Geoff,

Thanks for sharing, and yes I agree, with all those chemicals and isotopes your COVID was probably low on your list of concerns 😂

Nice work, and spectrum seems to show the 143, 163 and 205 gammas, also a peak at 2614 which might be in your background.

Very cool, but not sure if I would do this in my kitchen...

Steven

[Geoff]

I mean. I did it in my shop, not my kitchen. And everything I used is a household chemical available at any store. But yeah. Thanks for the hate I guess.

[Sesselmann]

Geoff,

Once again, thanks for sharing this method of Uranium extraction, and of course I trust you carried it out safely.

For someone like me without the right equipment and expertise it looks hazardous (hence my comment).

So if I understand it correctly the yellowcake is basically Uranium oxide. Is it possible to turn the yellowcake into Uranium metal or is the melting point too high?

[Sparky]

Very interesting experiment. Thanks for posting. You should check it monthly for a while and observe the U238 daughters, Th234 and Pa234m, "grow in" as your U ages. Otherwise you will have to wait a 50,000 years or so for it to change again. Attached is a screen shot of a wise-uranium.org calculator that helped me understand why U235 is the only isotope showing up in your spectrum. It shows one year of in-growth for natural isotope ratios.