Harvesting V-48 at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory

As part of an effort to develop aqueous isotope harvesting techniques at radioactive beam facilities, V-48 and a cocktail of primary- and secondary-beam ions created by the fragmentation reaction of a 160 MeV/nucleon Ni-58 beam were stopped in an aqueous target cell. After collection, V-48 was separated from the mixture of beam ions using cation-exchange chromatography. The extraction efficiency from the aqueous solution was (47.0 +/- 2.5)%, and the isolated V-48 had a radiochemical purity of 95.8%. This proof-of-concept work shows that aqueous isotope harvesting could provide significant quantities of rare isotopes which are currently unavailable at conventional facilities.