How can different isotopes of an element be produced?
How can isotopes be produced–especially radioisotopes, which can serve many useful purposes? There are two basic methods: separation and synthesis. Some isotopes occur in nature. If radioactive, these usually are radioisotopes with very long half-lives. Uranium 235, for example, makes up about 0.7 percent of the naturally occurring uranium on the earth.[89] The challenge is to separate this very small amount from the much larger bulk of other forms of uranium. The difficulty is that all these forms of uranium, because they all have the same number of electrons, will have identical chemical behavior: they will bind in identical fashion to other atoms. Chemical separation, developing a chemical reaction that will bind only uranium atoms, will separate out uranium atoms, but not distinguish among different isotopes of uranium. The only difference among the uranium isotopes is their atomic weight. A method had to be developed that would sort atoms according to weight. One initial proposal
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