Determination of regulatory organic compounds in radioactive waste samples. Semivolatile organics in aqueous liquids

The regulatory semivolatile organic compounds present in radioactive aqueous waste samples are extracted and concentrated in a small-scale version of a standard EPA procedure normally used for ground waters. Decontamination is sufficient to permit analysis of the extract in a conventional gas chromatography/mass spectrometry laboratory. The performance of the modified procedure, based on surrogate standards, matrix spikes and matrix spike duplicates, and blanks, is comparable to that of the standard method. The modified procedure was applied to a variety of aqueous radioactive waste tank samples. Only 12 of the EPA Appendix VIII compounds were present, and none in concentrations exceeding the reporting limit (500 or 2,500 μg/L). The most common semivolatile present was tributyl phosphate, an organic extractant commonly used in radiochemical processing, at 2,000-30,000 μg/L