The U.S. has been complaining for some time that major suppliers of isotopes, including the National Research Universal reactor at Chalk River, Ont., use weapons-grade uranium that could get into ...

Highly enriched uranium (HEU) contains 20% or more of the U-235 isotope. This higher level of enrichment makes it suitable for specialized applications, some of which carry significant security ...

The reactor uses highly enriched uranium to produce the molybdenum-99 that is used to produce medical isotopes. It's the only grade of uranium from which it is possible to produce a plutonium bomb ...

The difference between uranium-238 and uranium-235 When we dig uranium out of the ground, 99.27% of it is uranium-238, which has 92 protons and 146 neutrons. Only 0.72% of it is uranium-235 with 92 ...

The enrichment dilemma Uranium-235 is an isotope of uranium, which is a version of an element that has the same basic identity but weighs a little more or less. Think about apples from the same tree.

That’s because of the two main uranium isotopes, onlyuranium-235 can support a fission chain reaction: one neutron causes an atom to fission, which produces energy and some more neutrons ...

The U.S.'s move to produce its own medical isotopes isn't surprising, said Dominic Ryan, president of the Canadian Institute for Neutron Scattering, which does its research at Chalk River.

The four uranium isotopes. Note the relative abundance of U-238 and U-235. It is approximately 140 times more abundant in U-238, making it a pain in the ass to obtain purified U-235. The minute ...

Technetium is usually supplied through nuclear reactors that produce molybdenum-99, a radioactive isotope that decays to produce technetium. The U of A's cyclotron can produce the technetium directly.

One isotope of uranium, uranium-235, is fissile, meaning it can sustain the nuclear chain reaction used in reactors and bombs. The two other isotopes, uranium-238 and uranium-234, are not fissile.

When we dig uranium out of the ground, 99.27% of it is uranium-238, which has 92 protons and 146 neutrons. Only 0.72% of it is uranium-235 with 92 protons and 143 neutrons (the remaining 0.01% are ...