Advances in 79Se analyses on Savannah river site radioactive waste matrices

Waste cleanup efforts underway at the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, as well as other DOE nuclear sites, have created a need to characterize 79Se in radioactive waste inventories. Successful analysis of 79Se in high activity waste matrices is challenging for a variety of reasons. As a result of these unique challenges, the successful quantification of 79Se in the types of matrices present at SRS requires an extremely efficient and selective separation of 79Se from high levels of interfering radionuclides. A robust 79Se radiochemical separation method has been developed at the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) which is routinely capable of successfully purifying 79Se from a wide range of interfering radioactive species. In addition to dramatic improvements in the Kd, ease, and reproducibility of the analysis, the laboratory time has been reduced from several days to only 6 h.