Solid Extraction Chromatography Research Articles

Use of solid extraction chromatography for determination of uranium in sea water and brine

AbstractBench scale field trials were initiated for the development of effective technology for recovery of uranium from sea water using acrylonitrile absorbents synthesized by radiation grafting. One of the important needs is to ensure quality assurance for the accurate measurement of heavy metal ion concentrations from lean solutions such as sea water and brine. Efforts have been made at Bioassay Laboratory of Radiation Safety Systems Division in India to improve the radiochemical separation and detection techniques for rapid, sensitive and accurate estimation of uranium in sea water samples. The earlier method using ion exchange had disadvantages of being lengthy and required use of sulphuric acid. Hence, a method was developed for estimation of uranium concentration in natural sea water and brine (desalination plant effluents) samples by solid extraction chromatography (SEC) using UTEVA resin (Uranium and TEtraValents Actinides). This resin consists of dipentyl pentylphosphonate sorbed onto an inert p...

A rapid radio-bioassay method for strontium estimation in nuclear/radiological emergencies

Strontium (Sr) is a by-product of the nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. It is an important radionuclide in spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste and is considered as one of the most hazardous constituents of nuclear wastes. Also during a nuclear/radiological emergency, workers as well as members of the public may get internally contaminated with Sr. Hence, a truly rapid radio-bioassay method will be needed to screen a large number of people for assessment of internal contamination and facilitate decision making on subsequent medical intervention. The current precipitation method used at Bioassay Lab., BARC, Trombay is quite lengthy and laborious. Efforts are being made to optimize bioassay methods at BARC using solid extraction chromatography (SEC) technique for emergency response. The present work reports standardization of SEC using Sr-Spec (Sr-Specific, make Eichrom Technologies, Darien, Illinois, USA) resin for rapid estimation of Sr in urine samples. Adsorbed Sr is eluted from the resin using 0.05M HNO 3 , precipitated as carbonate and estimated using a low background gas flow Geiger-Muller counter (make ECIL, Hyderabad, India). The average recovery of stable Sr is ~80% and comparable to radioactive recovery observed in spiked samples. The minimum detectable activity (MDA) achieved by this technique is ~4 mBq/mL for 90 Sr that is well below the required generic emergency action level of 19 Bq for 20 mL urine sample. The advantage of this method is its simplicity, fast turnaround time and an increase in the sample throughput.