APPLICATION OF AMS AND INVERSE PIXE TO THE STUDY OF RADIOACTIVE-WASTE MANAGEMENT PROBLEMS

Some long-lived radionuclides (Ni-59, Zr-93, Mo-93, Nb-94, Tc-99, Pd-107, Sm-151) must be measured at levels < 10(-3) Bq/g in radioactive wastes. No method is able to achieve this at the moment, except accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) in the case of Ni-59, using high energies. In this paper, we show that AMS at low energy (with a 3 MV tandem) is in principle able to measure the radionuclides of interest with the required sensitivity. To overcome the isobaric interferences, which are the limiting factor in AMS, characteristic projectile X-rays are measured (''inverse PIXE'').