A note on the class group of surfaces in 3-space (Q1070303)

Let W be a smooth complex projective 3-fold and \(B\subset W\) a reduced curve with irreducible components \(B_ 1,...,B_ m\). The author proves the existence of an irreducible normal surface \(T\subset W\) containing B, with Sing \(T\subset Sing B\) and such that one has an exact sequence \(0\to Pic W\to C(T)\to \oplus^{m}_{i=1}{\mathbb{Z}}[B_ i]\to 0,\) where C(T) means class group. As an immediate corollary one gets that any smooth connected curve D in \({\mathbb{P}}^ 3\) lies on a smooth surface \(S\subset {\mathbb{P}}^ 3\) with Picard number 2 such that Pic S is generated by D together with the hyperplane section. Another consequence says that any height-2 prime ideal Q in a regular factorial ring A which is a ring of quotients of some 3-dimensional finitely generated \({\mathbb{C}}\)-algebra, contains a height-1 prime ideal P such that A/P is normal and the class group C(A/P) is cyclicly generated by Q/P.