Abstract
A radiochemical separation procedure has been developed to determine traces of uranium in tungsten and molybdenum. In this procedure the fission product 140Ba, as indicator nuclide for uranium, is selectively separated from the matrix activities and from all other long-lived activation and fission products and obtained at high purity. The radionuclide in the final fraction is sufficiently pure so that it can be measured with high counting efficiency by [~-counting. The separation procedure consists of two steps: a cation-exchange separation to separate barium from the anionic matrix tungstate or molybdate, and many other elements. In the second step the Ba-fraction is further purified by precipitation of barium as barium chloride in 8M hydrochloric acid. The precipitate is then dissolved in water for ~-cotmting via the Cerenkov effect. The chemical yield for barium is 94.6 +- 2.6%. When samples of 0.1 g, a thermal neutron flux of 2.1013 n �9 cm -2 . s -l, an irradiation time of 10 hours and a measuring time of 2 hours were applied, then the detection limit of uranium was 4 ng/g.
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