Monitoring of Spent Nuclear Fuel Treatment Steps by Analytical Methods to Improve Efficiency

Nuclear power has broad application prospects as a kind of clean energy. One of the biggest controversies in the development of nuclear energy has been the potential environmental impact of spent fuel (SNF), which is the raw material of incomplete reactions and toxic byproducts.  At present, people still use landfills to deal with SNF residues, whether for low-level radioactive wastes or high-radioactive wastes after separation and transmutation.  Effective monitoring methods will greatly reduce the environmental hazards of these landfills. With the development of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), elements with short half-lives in water samples can also be detected. However, while providing high sensitivity, these mass spectrometry methods are also time-consuming and therefore cannot be intervened in time. Determining plutonium concentration by internal standard neodymium spectrophotometry is simple and rapid, but the spectroscopic method cannot deal with opaque and highly scattering media. This talk will discuss the pros and cons of these analytical methods over the past three decades, as well as the feasibility of other innovative approaches.

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