Rapid screening of boron isotope ratios in nuclear shielding materials by LA-ICPMS – a comparison of two different instrumental setups

Abstract

¹⁰B enriched resources are widely used in shielding materials such as boron-alloyed steels in nuclear reactors and storage containers. During production, quality control is an indispensable part of the process. In this study two methods for the rapid screening of ¹⁰B enriched special steel samples with a ¹⁰B isotopic fraction from 90 to 97% – taken from the production process – were developed and compared. We used both ns-LA-ICPMS and fs-LA-MC-ICPMS and evaluated the different instrumental setups for this application. Even though the micro-inhomogeneous boron distribution in the steel samples was determined by LA-ICPMS and EPMA no effect on the isotope ratios could be observed. Besides matrix- and isotope-ratio-matched standardization with in-house reference materials, a non-matrix- and non-isotope-ratio-matched calibration using NIST 610 glass SRM was applied successfully.