Determination of Am in Environmental Samples: A Review.

The determination of Am in the environment is of importance in monitoring its release and assessing its environmental impact and radiological risk. This paper aims to give an overview about the recent developments and the state-of-art analytical methods for Am determination in environmental samples. Thorough discussions are given in this paper covering a wide range of aspects, including sample pre-treatment and pre-concentration methods, chemical separation techniques, source preparation, radiometric and mass spectrometric measurement techniques, speciation analyses, and tracer applications. The paper focuses on some hyphenated separation methods based on different chromatographic resins, which have been developed to achieve high analytical efficiency and sample throughput for the determination of Am. The performances of different radiometric and mass spectrometric measurement techniques for Am are evaluated and compared. Tracer applications of Am in the environment, including speciation analyses of Am, and applications in nuclear forensics are also discussed.