Simple measurement of actinides in urine using solid-state scintillation

Rapid methods for determination of internal contamination play a key role during emergency situations in particular for incident response teams and affected populations. For this reason, these methods and their particular techniques must be fast, reliable, robust, simple and cost-efficient, as well as providing high-quality throughput. On the other hand, they are characterized by lower precision and they are often biased. The presented method is based on direct measurement of urine using powder scintillator YAP:Ce together with an alkaline medium as a replacement for traditional liquid scintillation cocktail. The overall efficiencies for trivalent actinides (Am-241 and Cm-244) were greater than 85% and 94%.