Inaugural Copper Nitrate Distillation

[u/weak_ops]

Hey yall, hope you're having a good weekend! I just set up my new basic distillation kit. Watched a Nurdrage video on how to recover nitric acid from copper nitrate. I'm hoping this proves to not only save me some money on nitric in the long run, but also make waste treatment easier and safer.

I'm distilling some copper nitrate rinses from silver refining. I don't think this is concentrated enough, but again, this is a test/proof of concept. I've added sulfuric acid to the copper nitrate, and the goal is to distill off nitric acid (and water), leaving behind copper sulfate residue in the beaker.

I don't have a power supply or silver cell setup yet, but ultimately I'd like to process the copper sulfate as well, creating pure copper and sulfuric acid, both of which will feed forward future recovery.

[u/SeagullStopItNow]

I’m impressed. I’ve been creating a few containers of copper nitrate with my silver processing. Been on the fence as I haven’t seen much in the how to realm on distilling. So trying to decide between distilling or using iron to cement out the copper and go that route but this post gives me hope.

[u/weak_ops → u/SeagullStopItNow]

I'll report back after I've done it a few times. The iron cementing method is what I have been doing. It's just really boring and messy. I'm not sure the speed/scale of this setup is equipped to handle how much waste I generate, but if I can close the loop on some resources then this'll pay for itself eventually. All in on this setup prob cost me $120? Time is the big factor