Determination of trace elements in radioactive and toxic materials by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry

A glove-box ICP-MS has been developed for the determination of trace elements in plutonium and actinide compounds in general. The analytical procedure investigated involves internal standardization and appropriate dilution of samples, and has the advantage of requiring neither a prior separation of the matrix nor its reconstitution for calibration purposes. The optimized parameters of this direct method of determination are described, as well as its efficiency for plutonium. For the latter purpose, the concentrations of a number of trace elements were determined in real samples and the results compared with those obtained by SSMS and ICP-AES. The agreement between the different sets of results is fairly good, showing that ICP-MS can compete with reference techniques for this type of determination. Because of the enclosed spectrometer configuration, some toxic matrices have also been studied. In addition, the application to beryllium is discussed. The detection limits obtained in actinide compounds and beryllium are, for most elements of interest, in the range 0.01-1 mu g g(-1).