Simultaneous determination of actinide and strontium nuclides by extraction chromatography

A relatively fast and simple separation procedure has been developed for the simultaneous determination of thorium, uranium, neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium and strontium radionuclides. Most of the isotopes of these elements are long-lived, pure alpha and beta emitters regarded as 'difficult to determine' ones in the literature. Our major goal was to develop a combined procedure capable for the analysis of all these nuclides in the same sample aliquot so that correlations can be revealed without the errors arising due to inhomogeneity of samples when the radionuclides are determined from different sub-samples. The combined procedure has the advantage that sample destruction becomes simpler and faster, too. The chemical procedure consists of co-precipitations for the pre-concentration of groups of chemically similar elements and extraction chromatographic separations for the purification of individual elements. By means of pre-concentration relatively big samples can be treated offering the possibility of low activity measurements that cannot be performed by analysing small sample amounts. Pre-concentration techniques were always chosen in order to improve the selectivity of the following separation steps. (authors)