Abstract
This report describes the determination of technetium in solutions from spent fuel reprocessing processes. Inductively coupled plasma emission spectrometry (ICPES) was employed after alkaline precipitation and/or anion exchange. Technetium in the form of pertechnetate is roughly separated from other elements by merely changing the acidity of the sample solution to make it alkaline. This works because most of the fission products (FPs) are precipitated along
with the heavy metals in an alkaline medium, whereas technetium is not. Technetium in some solutions from highly active processes is further purified with the aid of basic or weakly acid anion exchange after the alkaline precipitation mentioned above. The decontamination factors were found to be more than 104 and 105 for FPs and for the heavy metals, respectively. The amount of technetium separated is determined by ICPES, which measures the Tc II 261.00nm line without any significant interference. The relative standard deviations are 2.2% at 9μg ml-1 and 4.9% at 0.9μg ml-1 of technetium. The proposed method has been applied to samples from various streams of the Tokai Reprocessing Plant; the highly active liquid waste, the spent fuel dissolver solution, the aqueous phase of solvent extraction and the plutonium product solution.
