Recent progress of capillary electrophoresis in studying the speciation of actinides

•Proper environmental control of long-lived radionuclides is far from being resolved.•Isotopic and chemical speciation of actinides governs radiotoxicity and migration.•Capillary electrophoresis (CE) assesses redox and complexed forms of actinides.•ICP-MS coupled to CE holds promise for assaying accidental levels of actinides.

This article reviews recent applications of the method for actinide-speciation analysis, with emphasis on using capillary-electrophoresis-separation schemes integrated with inductively coupled plasma mass-spectrometry detection. Also brought into focus are studies in which the speciation information acquired is complemented by relevant thermodynamic data on complexation of actinides with naturally-occurring ligands.