Determination of technetium-99 in complex compounds by short-time instrumental neutron activation analysis

The aim of this work is to obtain fast and rather precise information on the content of technetium in small amounts of sample. Until now, the technetium content has been either determined by conductometric titration of pertechnetate or by liquid scintillation counting. Most of the wide variety of other analytical methods, available for the determination of technetium, have the disadvantage of demanding chemical procedures with the samples before or during the determination process (e.g., gravimetry, spectrophotometry, and electrochemical methods). The most selective method for determining technetium is the neutron activation analysis, allowing, in addition, a good reproducibility. This method has only been used for determining trace amounts and not for precise analysis of macro amounts. In this paper a technique, based on neutron activation of technetium-99, is described. It was developed for the analysis of technetium in pure complexes. 10 references, 2 figures, 2 tables