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Currently, nuclear facilities built in the 1960s and 1970s have reached their end of life. Thus, the nuclear facilities are decommissioned or will be so in the near future, thus creating a lot of radioactive waste, including concrete, barite concrete, cutting mud etc., that has to be measured free. Whereas, non-destructive measurements, such as gamma-spectrometry, is mostly easy to be done, measurements of nuclide specific alpha- and beta-emitters need tedious laboratory work. These circumstances often limit the amount of sample throughput. In addition, refractory U or Pu particles can be expected in radioactive decommissioning samples, where common leaching processes are limited in use. Therefore, a full dissolution process at high temperatures is of the essence, to dissolve refractory particles as well. Multi-radionuclide chemical separation schemes are highly in favor to increase the throughput of decommissioning samples. In this work, we propose an automatic process for fusion to dissolve the decommissioning samples completely. Lithium borate is proven to be a suitable flux agent when applied to the sample in a ratio of at least 1:1.2. Elevated temperatures of 1000 to 1065 °C in combination with an automated shaking of the crucible results in suitable conditions to dissolve complicated matrices and refractory particles. To separate Am, Pu and Sr of the chosen matrix, the resins TEVA-UTEVA-DGA-Sr_Resin (Triskem international, Bruz, FR) in series can be applied to increase sample throughput. The whole dissolution and separation process can be performed within 2-3 days for four samples in parallel and shows highly reproducible results, which was proven by tracer experiments and analysis of real decommissioning samples.

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