Isotope separation is the process of concentrating specific isotopes of a chemical element by removing other isotopes. The use of the nuclides produced is varied. The largest variety is used in research. By tonnage, separating natural uranium into enriched uranium and depleted uranium is the largest application. In the following text, mainly uranium enrichment is considered. This process is crucial in the manufacture of uranium fuel for nuclear power plants, and is also required for the creation of uranium-based nuclear weapons. Plutonium-based weapons use plutonium produced in a nuclear reactor, which must be operated in such a way as to produce plutonium already of suitable isotopic mix or grade.
Enriched uranium is a type of uranium in which the percent composition of uranium-235 has been increased through the process of isotope separation. Naturally occurring uranium is composed of three major isotopes: uranium-238, uranium-235, and uranium-234. 235U is the only nuclide existing in nature that is fissile with thermal neutrons.
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam.
The Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica is a research centre in the field of mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is part of the institutes organization of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and is located at the Amsterdam Science Park. This institute is famous as the creation site of the programming language Python. It was a founding member of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM).
A gas centrifuge is a device that performs isotope separation of gases. A centrifuge relies on the principles of centrifugal force accelerating molecules so that particles of different masses are physically separated in a gradient along the radius of a rotating container. A prominent use of gas centrifuges is for the separation of uranium-235 (235U) from uranium-238 (238U). The gas centrifuge was developed to replace the gaseous diffusion method of uranium-235 extraction. High degrees of separation of these isotopes relies on using many individual centrifuges arranged in series, that achieve successively higher concentrations. This process yields higher concentrations of uranium-235 while using significantly less energy compared to the gaseous diffusion process.
The Dr. A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories, or KRL for short, is a federally funded, multi-program national research institute and national laboratory site primarily dedicated to uranium enrichment, supercomputing and fluid mechanics. It is managed by the Ministry of Energy for the Government of Pakistan via partnership between the universities through the security contractor Strategic Plans Division Force due to its sensitivity. The site is located in Kahuta, a short distance north-east of Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan.
Jesse Wakefield Beams was an American physicist at the University of Virginia.
Amsterdam Science Park is a science park in the Oost city district of Amsterdam, Netherlands with foci on physics, mathematics, information technology and the life sciences. The 70 hectare park provides accommodations for science, business and housing. Resident groups include institutes of the natural science faculties of the University of Amsterdam, several research institutes, and related companies. Three of the colocations of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange are at the institutes SURFsara, NIKHEF, and Equinix-AM3 at the science park.
Daan Frenkel is a Dutch computational physicist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge.
The Spinoza Prize is an annual award of 2.5 million euro prize money, to be spent on new research given by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The award is the highest scientific award in the Netherlands. It is named after the philosopher Baruch de Spinoza.
The Dutch Research Council is the national research council of the Netherlands. NWO funds thousands of top researchers at universities and institutes and steers the course of Dutch science by means of subsidies and research programmes. NWO promotes quality and innovation in science. NWO is an independent administrative body under the auspices of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. NWO directs its approximate budget of 1 billion euros towards Dutch universities and institutes, often on a project basis. Also, NWO has its own research institutes and facilitates international cooperation. Current president of NWO since April 1, 2021 is Marcel Levi. Former NWO presidents include Stan Gielen, Peter Nijkamp and Jos Engelen.
The Zippe-type centrifuge is a gas centrifuge designed to enrich the rare fissile isotope uranium-235 (235U) from the mixture of isotopes found in naturally occurring uranium compounds. The isotopic separation is based on the slight difference in mass of the isotopes. The Zippe design was originally developed in the Soviet Union by a team led by 60 Austrian and German scientists and engineers captured after World War II, working in detention. In the West the type is known by the name of the man who recreated the technology after his return to the West in 1956, based on his recollection of his work in the Soviet program, Gernot Zippe. To the extent that it might be referred to in Soviet/Russian usage by any one person's name, it was known as a Kamenev centrifuge.
NanoNed is the Nanotechnology Research and Development initiative of Dutch Government. It is financed Ministry of Economic Affairs (Netherlands).Dutch Technology Foundation STW is responsible for the program management of NanoNed. It is a consortium of seven universities, TNO and Philips. University of Leiden, University of Utrecht and FOM institute AMOLF in Amsterdam are also the partners of NanoNed. Around 400 researchers are working within all these partners. On the basis of National Research and Development strength and industrial needs, 11 interdependent program has developed and named as "Flagship". Each of these flagships is led by a "Flagship Captain". In 2009, more than 400 researchers are working in different 200 projects.
Ad Lagendijk is a Dutch physicist working at the FOM-institute AMOLF in Amsterdam and at the University of Amsterdam. He is also a part-time professor at the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands.
Anna Sergeevna Akhmanova is a Russian-born professor of Cell Biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She is best known for her research regarding microtubules and the proteins, called TIPs, that stabilize one specific end of the tubules. Among the awards she has won, she was one of the recipients of the 2018 Spinoza Prize, the highest honor for Dutch scientists.
Cornelis Jan Bakker was a Dutch physicist and second Director General of CERN. He was also a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.
Huib Johan Bakker is a Dutch physicist working in the field of ultrafast spectroscopy. He has been president of research institute AMOLF since 1 February 2016.
Marileen Dogterom is a Dutch biophysicist and professor at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology. She published in Science, Cell, and Nature and is notable for her research of the cell cytoskeleton. For this research, she was awarded the 2018 Spinoza Prize.
Ana Achúcarro Jiménez is a Spanish researcher, academic, and professor of particle astrophysics and quantum field theory at the University of Leiden in Leiden, Netherlands. Her research considers the early universe, supergravity, black holes and solitons.
Purushottam Chakraborty is an Indian physicist who is one of the renowned experts in materials analysis using ion beams and secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS).
