Radiochemical methodologies applied to determination of zirconium isotopes in low-level waste samples from nuclear power plants.

The Zr determination in low-level radioactive wastes generated at nuclear power plants is an important issue for waste disposal purpose. This paper describes an analytical methodology developed for Zr determination based on selective separation using extractive resins associated with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and liquid scintillation counting (LSC) measurements. The Zr results obtained for waste samples were in a good agreement for both techniques and the detection limits of 0.045 μg L and 0.05 Bq L were obtained for ICP-MS and LSC techniques respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]