Progress on Radiochemical Analysis for Nuclear Waste Management in Decommissioning

With the increaed numbers of nuclear facilities have been closed and are being or are going to be decommissioned, it is required to characterise the produced nuclear waste for its treatment by identification of the radionuclides and qualitatively determine them. Of the radionuclides related to these activities, the pure beta and alpha emitters have to be chemical separated from the matrix and other radionuclides before measurement. Although much effort has been carried out, the accurate determination of them is still a major challenge because of the complex matrix and high requirement in radiochemical separation of radionuclides.
In order to improve and maintain the Nodic competence in analysis of radionculides in waste samples, a NKS B project on this topic was launched in 2009. During the first phase of the NKS-B RadWaste project (2009-2010), a good achivement has been reached on establishment of collaboration, identifing the requirements from the Nordic nuclear industries and optimizing and development of some analytical methods (Hou et al. NKS-222, 2010). In the year 2011, this project (NKS-B RadWaste2011) continued. The major achievements of this project in 2011 include: (1) development of a method for determination of long-lived 94Nb in the nuclear waste; (2) development of a sensitive method for measurement of 237Np using AMS; (3) improvement of analytical method for determinaiton of 99Tc using ICP-MS; (4) improvement of method for 14C measurement using LSC; and (5) Characterization of steel samples from Danish research reactor DK-3 for decommissioning. These progresses are summarized