Newsgroups: sci.space
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Transmutation (was: Interstellar Mining (?)
Message-ID: <1988Aug26.164453.22840@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <3695@drivax.UUCP> <1073@cfa183.cfa250.harvard.edu> <6413@ihlpl.ATT.COM>
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 88 16:44:53 GMT

In article <6413@ihlpl.ATT.COM> knudsen@ihlpl.ATT.COM (Knudsen) writes:
>Unless I'm missing something, we should be able to transmute
>small quantities of elements with current technology.

Remember that essentially all plutonium on Earth is made by transmutation.
There's rather a lot of it about, too.  (It is admittedly an unusually
favorable case, since neutron bombardment of uranium suffices.)  Many of
the isotopes used in tracer work are also made by transmutation.

>I once read that the Atomic Energy Commission built a huge
>machine to make Pu out of U by bombarding it with protons,
>using simple electrostatic acceleration...

I'm not aware of that gadget, although it might have existed.  There was,
at one point, a proposal to build a large and specialized accelerator for
making tritium; perhaps you saw a garbled report of that.

Another possibility is that this was a garbled report of the Oak Ridge
mass spectrometers, which were built to do uranium isotope separation
(which they did quite successfully, but not as well as gaseous diffusion)
but have been used since for gram-quantity isotope separation of other
elements for research.
-- 
Intel CPUs are not defective,  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
they just act that way.        | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu