Development of Flow Electrolytic Strategies for Separation and Radiometric Analysis of Radionuclides

Abstract

Radionuclides are used and produced for a variety of applications, such as in the framework of energy production and nuclear medicine. This requires appropriate monitoring which in turn translates into the analysis of a variety of radionuclides in demanding sample matrices. Radionuclide analysis is a challenging task and often requires complex chemical processing of the samples prior to radiometric measurements. This requirement arises due to interfering radionuclides as well as matrix elements, which typically prevent a direct measurement by α- and γ-spectrometry, liquid scintillation counting or mass spectrometry. Despite offering promising possibilities, electrochemical approaches have been rarely used so far for the separation and analysis of radionuclides. Here, we present the development of fast flow-through electrolytic separation approaches for the analysis of carrier-added/-free radionuclides in fundamental and applied research.