Chemical Treatment of US Department of Energy High Level and Low Level Waste to Obtain a Pure Radiochemical Fraction for Determination of Californium Alpha-Decay Content

We have developed a chemical separation technique that allows the radiochemical determination of the californium a-decay content in Department of Energy (DOE) high level wastes from the Hanford and Savannah River sites. The chemical separation technique uses a series of column extraction chromatography steps that use Eichrom Industries' lanthanide and actinide plus 3 oxidation state selective Ln-resin(R) and the transuranic selective plus 4 oxidation state TRU-resin(R) to obtain intermediate product phases in dilute nitric acid. The technique has been demonstrated on three types of authentic DOE high and low level waste samples. We obtain discrimination from Pu a-activity by a factor of over 200 and from Cm-244 a-activity by a factor approaching 1700. Californium recoveries are measured by addition of a Cf-249 spike and are in the range of 50 percent to 90 percent in the synthetic samples and are in the range of 1.4 percent to 48 percent for the authentic DOE waste samples.