Heavy-water plants, Canadian

Petrie, R. I. Design Developments Bruce Heavy Water Plants, Annual International Conference of the Canadian Nuclear Association, 16th, 1976, Vol. 2, p. 27. 

The very low D/H natural abundance ratio (0.015% = 150 ppm) is responsible for the high cost of heavy water. Materials balance requires a minimum of 7x 103 mol feed per mol of product, and that increases even more for reasonable values of tails analysis (in some plants the feed/product ratio has reached nearly 4 x 104). At peak Canadian production, 800t year-1, this amounted to feeds of 3 x 107t year-1. Clearly that figure demands a cheap and easily accessible feed (i.e. water), or alternatively, requires deuterium production to be parasitic on some large industrial process, for example the production of NH3 for fertilizer, or petrochemical processing. 

Table I. Canadian Heavy-Water Production Plants...

Canadian Occidental s interest in oil-in-water emulsions is related to marketing and transportation of Athabasca bitumen and heavy Alberta crude oils. A laboratory and pilot-plant development program was initiated in late 1984 at the Occidental Center (formerly the Cities Service Technology Center) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The program has included the following features ... 

---