Extracting Thorium Dioxide from Thoriated Tungsten Rods

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In this video we show how to get or extract thorium dioxide from commonly available thoriated Tungsten rods. Thoriated tungsten rods contain 2% thorium and are easily available online. They're among the easiest to get sources of radioactive materials other than smoke detectors. To extract the thorium, we need a way to remove the tungsten in the rods. Tungsten is resistant to acids but it is vulnerable to hydrogen peroxide. Although i prefer using electricity which is even cheaper than peroxide and also safer if handled correctly. For our 60g of thoriated tungsten rods we make our electrolyte consisting of 40g of sodium hydroxide in 200mL of water. We apply an electric current with the tungsten rods being our anodes. We can use any conductive metal for the cathodes but i'm using tungsten as well for convenience. We apply an electric current of 2amps with a maximum voltage of 6 volts. And that slowly dissolves the tungsten. I ran into the problem of the tungsten rods breaking in them middle due to uneven dissolution, so i used titanium tea infusers as anode baskets.

Eventually the tungsten dissolves into sodium tungstate and the thorium drops away as thorium dioxide powder. I tried to filter the powder but it passed through. I could use a finer filter but instead i just simply let the powder settle and decant it. Then i washed it a few times with water and decanted again. This then produced crude thorium dioxide powder. This is good enough for most purposes, but if you really want it cleaner you can remove leftover tungsten dust by stirring the thorium dioxide with hydrogen peroxide (5%), it will take a few days but it will dissolve the tungsten into tungstic acid. If you have sodium hydroxide in solution it will create soluble sodium tungstate that can be washed off.



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