Rapid screening of boron isotope ratios in nuclear shielding materials by LA-ICPMS – a comparison of two different instrumental setups

10B enriched resources are widely used in shielding materials such as boron-alloyed steels in nuclear reactors and storage containers. During production, quality control is an indispensable part of the process. In this study two methods for the rapid screening of 10B enriched special steel samples with a 10B isotopic fraction from 90 to 97% – taken from the production process – were developed and compared. We used both ns-LA-ICPMS and fs-LA-MC-ICPMS and evaluated the different instrumental setups for this application. Even though the micro-inhomogeneous boron distribution in the steel samples was determined by LA-ICPMS and EPMA no effect on the isotope ratios could be observed. Besides matrix- and isotope-ratio-matched standardization with in-house reference materials, a non-matrix- and non-isotope-ratio-matched calibration using NIST 610 glass SRM was applied successfully.