Ultratrace determination of curium

Development of a method for detection of curium at near single atom levels is being undertaken as a part of the Advanced Concepts Project at Argonne National Laboratory with funding from the US Department of Energy, Office of Arms Control and Nonproliferation. Ultratrace determination of curium, with the ability to quantify the fraction that is curium-242, provides a signature method of detecting clandestine reprocessing of recently irradiated uranium targets. Curium initially present in any of a variety of materials such as air filters, solid or liquid process waste, soil, flora, or fauna can be recovered via current chemical separations processing techniques. Using the ultratrace method being developed, such recovered curium will be quantified with thousand-fold higher sensitivity than the best currently available method which is alpha counting. This high sensitivity arises because, on average, a given trivalent curium (Cm{sup 3+}) ion can emit a very large number of fluorescence photons before alpha decay occurs