Exploring rapid chemical separations of Sc-47 produced from photonuclear reactions on natural vanadium targets

Scandium-47 (47Sc) production via bremsstrahlung irradiation of natural vanadium targets offers significant advantages for producing high purity 47Sc; this work evaluates several rapid dissolution and chemical separation techniques for recovering high purity 47Sc from irradiated vanadium. Techniques developed are combined into a simple, gram-scale, semi-automated target processing system that enables 47Sc recovery from irradiated vanadium targets with chemical yields as high as 93 ± 3% and 47Sc/V separation factors of 6 ± 3 ·1011 within 90 min total processing times. Future research into H2O2 resistant separation techniques and their applicability for direct process coupling to chelation are recommended.