Efficient Determination of Actinoid Elements in Food, Feeds, and Water by Single Extracting Resin and Alpha Spectrometry Detection

The research on methods for radiochemical determination of alpha-emitting radioactive elements is constantly evolving, and is essentially focused on reducing sample analysis times and using increasingly less aggressive and polluting chemical reagents. Even the most widely used chromatographic resins can be dangerous for operators and for the environment, and researchers try as much as possible to reduce the quantities used. In particular, an attempt is made to reuse the chromatographic resins at least a second time, also considering the fact that these reagents can also be quite expensive for a test laboratory. The present study presents a radiochemical method for the simultaneous determination of alpha-emitting isotopes of thorium, uranium, plutonium, americium, and curium in agri-food matrices and water, using a single commercially available chromatographic resin that is used twice in the same analytical run. The method, designed for laboratories that need to analyze many matrices for radioactivity monitoring programs, has proven to be precise and accurate, achieving very high values of chemical yield (> 75% in solid matrices, > 90% in water) and z -scores lower than 2 in the context of two important international proficiency tests.