210Po in the environment: insight into the naturally occurring polonium isotope

Optimization of 210Po determination in soil

“…It is important for the mixture to contain oxidizing agents like HNO 3 or H 2 O 2 (to destroy organic matter and partially decompose the inorganic part of the matrix), which can be supported by inoxidizing acids like HCl. Decomposition of silica is achieved by addition of HF; however, opinions on the infl uence of silica decomposition on the results remain contradictory [6].…”

“…In case of polonium, several methods of purifi cation and concentration are available, among which most commonly used are: fuming with HCl (under IR radiators), co-precipitation with Fe(OH) 3 or MnO 2 , and separation on ion exchange columns [6]. The goal of this study was to achieve a rapid and cheap method, which would not result in the unnecessary production of waste.…”

A fast strategy to sequentially separate and determine 90Sr, 210Pb and 210Po in water samples using Sr resin

“…In the literature, as can be seen in Table 1, there are a number of Sr resin based strategies that individually separate one of these three radionuclides [8][9][10] or even isolate two of them -e.g. 90 Sr and 210 Pb [11][12][13], 90 Sr and 210 Po [14] or 210 Pb and 210 Po [5,7,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21] -in different kinds of matrices. The table shows the load sample, resin conditioning media and radionuclide elution media used, these being the main parameters that may have an influence on recovery.…”

“…In the literature there are various approaches in which these radionuclides have been determined in environmental water samples [4][5][6]. These strategies generally include a radiochemical separation, which is mandatory as sample pretreatment to avoid measurement interferences [5,7,8]. The authors of these approaches have usually focused on determining a single radionuclide or in some cases two.…”

“…As regards 210 Pb, this radionuclide presents a high retention in nitric acid (0.1 -8 M) and hydrochloric acid (0.1 -2 M) media [18,23]. Similarly, 210 Po is highly retained in 1 M HNO 3 [23], despite the fact that high recoveries were also achieved in other conditions, such as stronger nitric acid concentrations (8 M HNO 3 ) and in a wide range of HCl concentrations [5]. It can therefore be concluded that both the composition of the conditioning solvent and the sample loading solution are important because they have a notable effect on the selectivity and retention capacity of each radionuclide on the resin.…”