Preparing for Harvesting Radioisotopes from FRIB

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) will be a new national user facility at Michigan State University and funded by the Department of Energy. FRIB will have the ability to accelerate uranium to 200 MeV/nucleon and light ions with even more energy, enabling production of extremely exotic radioisotopes. FRIB will also generate a host of auxiliary long-lived radioisotopes that could be harvested for off-line use. A study to harvest several useful radioisotopes from FRIB is being conducted using current conditions at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) to determine the production and extraction yields after the radioisotopes are accelerated into an aqueous target. Information from modeling of the nuclear reactions performed at NSCL was used to streamline the isolation and extraction procedures for the radioisotopes ²⁴Na and ⁶⁷Cu to date. These procedures were first developed with “cold”, non-radioactive, species, and later implemented with “hot”, radioisotopes at the NSCL.