The Curve of Binding Energy

"Paul F. Dietz" writes:

Henry Spencer wrote:

1. The absorption spectrum of uranium is a complex tangle, and UF6 is
even worse, and only a few of the lines stand out well enough from the
crowd to be useful.

2. Those lines have a troublesome tendency to be in the UV or far IR,
where efficient lasers are scarce and tunable ones are even scarcer.

I read speculation that AVLIS (the atomic vapor scheme) was really
intended for use with plutonium, not uranium, with the goal to make
almost pure 239Pu from the Pu separated from most any reactor's
spent fuel.

This makes excellent sense. With a mass difference of only one from
240Pu (the major problem) and higher radioactivity, diffusion or
centrifuges would be horrible for this separation.

There was also a technique being researched to do isotope separation
using femtosecond laser pulses. [...] A time-domain rather than a
frequency-domain approach [...] Some researchers achieved separation
of bromine isotopes using this approach.

They got 2.4x (not %, x) isotope enrichment with fairly generic lasers,
so the questions are (a) can you make it work with uranium or
plutonium, and (b) throughput...

Lou Scheffer