...salt as 250 g/liter.
US 3704211
It's a patent, so it's not necessarily filled with truth.
Still, it's indicative of the general trend. I would not be surprised to learn that some of the sludges in the Hanford tanks actually contain cesium pertechnetate, although if I came across this in my readings on the Hanford tanks, I would think I'd remember it and I don't.
Almost all papers modelling technetium chemistry that do not actually involve technetium utilize rhenium. Many papers with actual technetium chemistry also consider rhenium. Because of the lanthanide contraction their atomic radii are almost identical. This implies that their chemical separations would be challenging, as is the case with zirconium and hafnium, and especially tantalum and niobium.
This has little current industrial interest, but I could imagine situations where it would be, were one to make machinable tungsten alloys by substituting rhenium with technetium. In a neutron flux, some of the tungsten would be transmuted into rhenium, particularly in "breed and burn" type reactors with irradiation periods of decades, or - should they ever go commercial - fusion reactors.
Recycling the alloys might thus require this separation.
Thanks for pointing out the sad matter of the lack of subscripts and superscripts at DU. It's unfortunate for those of us who use the science forum. I really don't understand why that code represented a security risk, but I'm not a programming type.
The half-life of technetium (the 99 low energy isomer) is, according to the BNL Nuclear Data site, 211,100 years. This means it is definitely usable in alloys, particularly those utilized in high temperature nuclear applications.
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