Intercomparison exercise on difficult to measure alpha radionuclides in spent ion exchange resin

Abstract

In radiochemical analysis of decommissioning waste, reference materials are not commercially available and consequently intercomparison exercises are needed for method validations. This paper reports the results from an intercomparison exercise focusing on analyses of α-emitter radionuclides in spent ion exchange resin. The exercise and statistical analysis of the submitted results were carried out based on ISO 13528 standard according to which the assigned values were calculated from the participant’s results and the performances were assessed using z-scores, which showed excellent performance for all 241Am analyses, good performance for 238Pu analyses, tolerable performance for 239,240Pu analyses, and questionable 243,244Cm analyses.