239Plutonium

Buesseler and Halverson [ 92 ] have described a thermal ionisation mass spec-trometric technique for the determination of 239plutonium and 240plutonium in seawater. The mass spectrometric technique was more sensitive than a spectrometry by more than order of magnitude. 

Kim et al. [30] have demonstrated good agreement between methods of determining 237neptunium in soils, based on inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, neutron activation analysis and a-spectrometry. Kim et al. [30] determined the 240plutonium to 239plutonium ratio in soils using the fission track method and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS). 

The analytical separation of 239plutonium and 240plutonium in environmental samples is usually not possible using a-particle spectrometry because of the small difference in a energies, but this problem was solved in one study by additional measurement of the L X-rays emitted from the same sources [ 39 ]. 

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