A method for measurement of ultratrace 79Se with accelerator mass spectrometry

79Se is a long-lived fission product with chemical and radiological toxicity. It is one of the radionuclides of interest in nuclear waste disposal due to its potential migration capacity to the surface environment. Furthermore, 79Se is an ideal tracer in biomedicine. One of the major obstacles in the measurement of ultratrace 79Se with AMS is the strong interference from the isobaric nuclide 79Br. This paper presents a new ultra-sensitive method for 79Se measurements with AMS. The novel aspects of our procedures include the extraction of SeO2- molecular ions, that results in a suppression of 79Br background by as much as about five orders of magnitude; the selection of Ag2SeO3 as the chemical form of Se in the target sample, that brings about a relatively large and stable SeO2- beam current; and the renovation of the multi-anode detector, that makes 79Se better identified from the interfering nuclide 79Br. By using these procedures, a sensitivity of better than 1.0 × 10−12 has been achieved for 79Se/Se measurement with the CIAE-AMS system. It is then possible to quantify the tracer 79Se in biological samples. Recently, we are prepared to develop the 79Se-AMS biological tracer methodology.