Separation and preconcentration of perrhenate from ionic solutions by ion exchange chromatography.

Technetium poses an environmental hazard because of its radioactivity and long half-life. It exists in the form of pertechnetate in the environment and can be modeled by the nonradioactive ion perrhenate, since pertechnetate and perrhenate have the same geometry and similar chemical properties. In this research, a new zinc cyclen resorcinarene cavitand (ZCR) column was used in ion chromatography (IC) to efficiently separate perrhenate.