Chemical Forums
Specialty Chemistry Forums => Citizen Chemist => Topic started by: sslaptnhablhat on May 04, 2017, 05:15:29 PM
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Sorry for being a noob at chemistry, but I have a question, if Technetium-99 is produced as bulk waste from nuclear reactors, then why is it so diffucult to buy in contrast to other, more dangerous radioisotopes like U-238?
EDIT Sorry for incorrect category, didn't think before posting.
EDIT 2 Made title more relevant.
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238U isn't especially dangerous. You can carry several kg in you bare hands and nothing happens.
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238U isn't especially dangerous. You can carry several kg in you bare hands and nothing happens.
I know that, I was just using it as an example, considering Technetium isn't very dangerous either.
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The wikipedia page pretty much sums this up -- what we have here is market forces. There's little use for this metal industrially, only a few places make it, and yet, can't even get rid of it. So there's no excess for someone to buy, package, and make accessible to the hobbyist.
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[...] Technetium isn't very dangerous either.
99Tc (we don't speak about 99mTc) has a half-life 20 000 times shorter than 238U, that's not the same. And while 99Tc is a simple beta emitter, electrons braking in the surroundings emit X rays which are dangerous, much more so than the rather harmless 238U alpha emitter.
Then, one should check how pure 99Tc can be, as a waste of fission reactions. If mixed with 0.1% of an other nuclide with 50 years half-life, the resulting radioactivity is 5 times stronger, and most fission products emit gammas. Purifying much one nuclide from the horribly radioactive mix of fission products costs a shiny penny.
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Thanks for the replies, I think I understand it better now.
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On a side-note, Tc98 has a half-life of 6,600,000 years, but is still incredibly difficult to obtain, and the element in question appears to be extremely "underrated", as in you always hear/see people talking about how cool and/or interesting other elements like Uranium, Osmium, Caesium etc. are but never Technetium, as if people in general don't care about it in the slightest, despite it being somewhat interesting, at least not the most boring, element. About the second point, what gives?
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99Tc is produced in vast amounts by uranium fission at reactors, 98Tc is not.
http://nucleardata.nuclear.lu.se/toi/nuclide.asp?iZA=430098
May I ask what the point of collecting radioactive materials is? 1.8MeV beta-minus do emit gammas per bremsstrahlung, and 6M years is a significant radioactivity.
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99Tc is produced in vast amounts by uranium fission at reactors, 98Tc is not.
http://nucleardata.nuclear.lu.se/toi/nuclide.asp?iZA=430098
May I ask what the point of collecting radioactive materials is? 1.8MeV beta-minus do emit gammas per bremsstrahlung, and 6M years is a significant radioactivity.
Thanks for the info, but I have to admit most of it comes from the fact that not a single person I've seen on the internet, let alone element distributor / collector hobbyist has ever actually owned the element, it seems like it'd be worth having a small sample of just because it's one of the most difficult elements to obtain for collections.
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If you're interested in the element, which doesn't occur naturally, then the easiest isotope is 99Tc since nuclear reactors produce it as a waste.
Besides the dangers to you, a difficulty is that all radioactive materials are controlled and regulated because they're dangerous by nature and because they can serve to assemble a dirty bomb. And also, because this one results from the nuclear energy which is controlled down to the waste. This suffices to explain why the element is uncommon among collectors.
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If you're interested in the element, which doesn't occur naturally, then the easiest isotope is 99Tc since nuclear reactors produce it as a waste.
Besides the dangers to you, a difficulty is that all radioactive materials are controlled and regulated because they're dangerous by nature and because they can serve to assemble a dirty bomb. And also, because this one results from the nuclear energy which is controlled down to the waste. This suffices to explain why the element is uncommon among collectors.
Thanks again for the info.
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Because my old thread is moreorless dead, and because this probably deserves its' own thread anyway, I'll go ahead and ask this here. Anyway, it seems most people can agree that Technetium is exceedingly difficult to obtain for an element collector, and so far, after months of searching, I have no leads. Does anyone know of anywhere I can actually purchase the metal?
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Please don't create a new thread, to ask the exact same question. This old thread is a fine one -- you ask a question, you get multiple answers, everyone learns something new for the future. You may not like the answers you've gotten so far, but unless you can specifically say what's wrong with these answers, no one will learn anything.
FWIW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_collecting
(Additionally, unsuccessful attempts have occasionally been made by private individuals to collect technetium, because it has a long half-life of several million years, is not used in nuclear weapons like the longer-lived plutonium, and decays to clean stability.)
I have no idea what this Wikipedia author is trying to say. If technetium decays slowly, to something non-radioactive, why can't people have a tiny amount in a thick glass vial?
Checking our forums, our forum regular woelen: has a web page with his collection. http://woelen.homescience.net/science/chem/compounds/index2.html And, dang, even he doesn't have technetium. Dang. This is a conspiracy, I tells ya.
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99Tc being a product of uranium fission, it is extracted only at reprocessing plants for spent fuel rods, whatever the downstream commercial path is, if any. "Someone" at these plants would know which company sells the material extracted by the plant.
The reprocessing plants are very few: Sellafield, La Hague, Tokaimura, definitely some in Russia, probably in the US and China. India, Pakistan and North Korea have some sort of plant to extract plutonium and tritium from the spent rods and build bombs. By the way, the primary purpose of all these plants (except maybe Tokaimura) was historically to feed bombs and has only diversified a bit over time (make MOX fuel, extract maybe the residual 235U, prepare the long-time storage). Good luck.
First difficulty: if you call La Hague and tell "I want to buy some of your stuff" you can be 100% certain to get trouble by the secret police.
Second difficulty: if the market for 99Tc is too small, the plant won't separate it for you, and even if it's already available, it may be too radioactive because traces of other nuclides with a much shorter half-life pollute it.
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Thanks for the replies, and sorry for creating a new topic, but I swear, be it in a week or a decade from now, I'll obtain a sample of Technetium, even if it kills me.
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I am in luck (Kinda)! http://onyxmet.com/?route=product/product&path=69_326&product_id=2497
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Does anyone have any ideas on the amount of 99mTc that typically enters the body during a radioactive tracer scan, and if it'd be practical to try to extract however much 99Tc that'd be excreted in urine?
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In a home lab?
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I would be ridiculously impressed if someone pulled this off in any lab. I know in the early days of nuclear research they went to extreme lengths to reclaim the precious materials, including extracting it from the excretions of a worker who spilled plutonium (I think?) on himself .
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Only now do I realise how ridiculous my question sounds, lol.
So, 99mTc's specific activity, according to http://www.iem-inc.com/information/tools/specific-activities (http://www.iem-inc.com/information/tools/specific-activities), is 5,200,000 Ci/g. According to Wikipedia, 11-30 mCi are injected into patients, so we'll assume an average of 20 mCi, or 0.02 Ci. Dividing this by 5,200,000, we get 3.85x10-9 grams. Wow.
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I'm sure you could get out those 4 nanograms from a several gallons of urine over a few weeks! :P