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| Neon |
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| Cerebus:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on March 21, 2022, 01:32:30 am --- --- Quote from: Cerebus on March 20, 2022, 10:10:12 pm --- --- Quote from: LaserSteve on March 20, 2022, 08:58:59 pm ---If I was in a war zone as science officer and I found an undamaged isotopic gas plant, I know it'd want to crate it up and send it to the home country.. --- End quote --- If you were, one hopes you'd been adequately briefed on your obligations under the Geneva Convention relating to the protection of civilian property so you knew that you shouldn't, even if you wanted to, as that would be a war crime. It's only permissible to expropriate military materiel. Cryoin and Ingas are both civilian organisations. --- End quote --- I am sure that Putin and the Russians are spending a great deal of time evaluating whether their actions are compliant with the Geneva Convention. Same for the Ukrainians. War is a desperate business, and the rules are written by the victors. --- End quote --- Yes, but LaserSteve is from a civilised country that one hopes teaches its military to comply with the Geneva Conventions, which incidentally can trace their ancestry via the Hague Conventions back to the Lieber Code which was itself a product of the American Civil War. It's precisely because war is a nasty business, and some people use it as an excuse to behave beyond the necessary horrors thereof, that we have things like the Conventions, have had international war crimes tribunals and have the International Criminal Court and other international institutions to make sure that the victors don't get to write arbitrary rules. It's not perfect, but it's better than "Might makes right". |
| Vovk_Z:
When we are talking about Russia I don't see much thinking about Geneva conventions (at their side). |
| Kleinstein:
For the chemical purification of neon I don't see large technical hurdles and very special expertise needed. So it could be relatively fast for a new plant to be set up somewhere in the US and / or western Europe or ramp up the facility in China. It is not a big thing, more like a rather special niche product. The isotope separation may be a bit more compliated, but still not a huge volume - maybe ask the Iran ? :-DD The more critcal product from the Ukrain is food and this is already starting to imparct northern africa. |
| Cerebus:
--- Quote from: Kleinstein on March 21, 2022, 11:31:28 am ---For the chemical purification of neon I don't see large technical hurdles and very special expertise needed. So it could be relatively fast for a new plant to be set up somewhere in the US and / or western Europe or ramp up the facility in China. It is not a big thing, more like a rather special niche product. --- End quote --- It's a question of what you're calling "relatively fast". I've heard figures of 2 years before you could get a plant on-stream being passed around and that doesn't seem unrealistic to me. One would need to build a plant that does fractional distillation at cryogenic temperatures (Ne boiling point 27 K, -246ºC), one would need to build it ultra-clean to start with, cool it down, and then run it long enough to purge unwanted gas residues from all the internal surfaces before taking out production gases. The purging bit is critical, as how quickly surface contaminants are likely to be purged is proportional to the square root of thermodynamic temperature. Remember that to purge surfaces of residual gas in a vacuum system one bakes it at as high a temperature as the system will allow (120ºC is fairly typical). Oh, and on a pedantic technicality, it's not chemical purification, it's physical. You can't chemically purify neon, what with it being a noble gas and all. |
| LaserSteve:
I didn't know Geneva applied to civilian industry. Thanks for the education. The laboratory scale isotope enrichment process for neon is very much like the gravity drip process for heavy water. Build a vertical tall pipe, run a glowing hot heating element down it's center, fill with natural neon, wait hours or days for equilibrium, tap off tiny amount at each end. There is also a DC high current glow discharge method using cataphorisis. Neither of the above is fast , nor do they produce any reasonable quantity. Both can be ran by graduate students. Neither is commercially viable. The hot vertical pipe process was used in World War Two to produce slightly enriched UF6 feedstock. It is anything but efficient. So I'd agree, two years to add a retrofit to a large existing cryo plant would seem reasonable. Edit, Incidently the US has a few working calutrons for very, very, small scale production of various metal isotopes for medicine etc. That project must cost a small fortune to run. Steve |
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