Comparisons of soil pretreatment methods for SF-ICP-MS determination of ultra-trace level plutonium in water soluble and exchangeable fractions.

In this study, we developed a method to evaluate the potentially bioavailable fraction of Pu in agricultural soils by determining their water soluble and exchangeable fractions. Three commonly used pretreatment methods were compared for their ability and performances to process the extracted solutions. Results showed that these three methods were able to obtain consistent Pu concentration results; however, based on the experimental performance factors, we considered that wet-ashing followed by Fe(OH)₃ co-precipitation was the best pretreatment method, with which high ²⁴²Pu recoveries for the overall process were realized for the water soluble fraction (69.8%) and the exchangeable fraction (70.6%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]