Measurement of plutonium isotope ratios in nuclear fuel samples by HPLC-MC-ICP-MS

The described chromatographic separation is sufficient to prevent any isobaric interference between 238Pu present at trace concentrations and 238U present as the main component of the fuel samples. The external reproducibility of the uncorrected plutonium isotope ratios was determined to be between 0.04 and 0.2% (2 s) resulting in a precision in the ‰ range for the isotopic vectors of the irradiated fuel samples.