Einsteinium - Synthesis and Extraction

Synthesis and Extraction

Einsteinium is produced in minute quantities by bombarding lighter actinides with neutrons in dedicated high-flux nuclear reactors. The world's major irradiation sources are the 85-megawatt High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, U.S., and the SM-2 loop reactor at the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors (NIIAR) in Dimitrovgrad, Russia, which are both dedicated to the production of transcurium (Z > 96) elements. These facilities have similar power and flux levels, and are expected to have comparable production capacities for transcurium elements, although the quantities produced at NIIAR are not widely reported. In a "typical processing campaign" at Oak Ridge, tens of grams of curium are irradiated to produce decigram quantities of californium, milligram quantities of berkelium (249Bk) and einsteinium and picogram quantities of fermium.

The first microscopic sample of 253Es sample weighing about 10 nanograms was prepared in 1961 at HFIR. A special magnetic balance was designed to estimate its weight. Larger batches were produced later starting from several kilograms of plutonium with the einsteinium yields (mostly 253Es) of 0.48 milligrams in 1967–1970, 3.2 milligrams in 1971–1973, followed by steady production of about 3 milligrams per year between 1974 and 1978. These quantities however refer to the integral amount in the target right after irradiation. Subsequent separation procedures reduced the amount of isotopically pure einsteinium roughly tenfold.