Determination of Pu-239 in Urine by Sector Field Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (SF-ICP-MS) Using an Automated Offline Sample Preparation Technique.

Here we report a new procedure to determine Pu-239 in urine using a custom-made automated pre-analytical processing system (single probe) with Pu-242 as a tracer followed by analysis by SF-ICP-MS. An average Pu-242 recovery rate of 88% was obtained with CF-ThU-1000 columns reused >100 times. Analytical results agree with measurements obtained using the CDC manual method with a R2 of 0.9994. Results for Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) reference materials (RM) align with target values with a bias range of -3.44% to 3.05%. The limit of detection for this method is 0.63 pg/L, which is comparable to previous manual methods.