Round Robin “Impurities in Uranium Matrix”: A Success for CETAMA and IAEA

The safeguard of nuclear material is of paramount importance to the IAEA which increasingly uses this information for characterization purposes in order to strengthen the verification of declared nuclear material and to identify the origin of samples from mines. IAEA tasked CETAMA to conduct a round robin with objective to evaluate the capability of laboratories to measure impurities in uranium with concentration levels between 1 and 500 ppm relative to uranium. This round robin was attended by 17 international laboratories from the nuclear industry and safeguards community. The results are mainly obtained by ICP-MS (14) and ICP-AES (3). The synthesis of this round robin were helpful in identifying anomalies and will allow the IAEA to better set realistic measurement performance targets for ICP-MS and ICP-AES.