Preparation of a multi-isotope plutonium AMS standard and preliminary results of a first inter-lab comparison

Abstract

The motivation of this work is to establish a new multi-isotope plutonium standard for isotopic ratio measurements with accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), since stocks of existing solutions are declining. To this end, certified reference materials (CRMs) of each of the individual isotopes 239Pu, 240Pu, 242Pu and 244Pu were obtained from JRC IRMM (Joint Research Center Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements). These certified reference materials (IRMM-081a, IRMM-083, IRMM-043 and IRMM-042a) were diluted with nitric acid and mixed to obtain a stock standard solution with an isotopic ratio of approximately 1.0:1.0:1.0:0.1 (239Pu:240Pu:242Pu:244Pu).From this stock solution, samples were prepared for measurement of the plutonium isotopic composition by AMS. These samples have been measured in a round-robin exercise between the AMS facilities at CologneAMS, at the ANU Canberra and ETH Zurich to verify the isotopic ratio and to demonstrate the reproducibility of the measurements. The results show good agreement both between the different AMS measurements and with the gravimetrically determined nominal ratios.