Determination of americium in a nitric acid medium using second-order derivative spectrophotometry

A second-order derivative spectrophotometric method has been developed for the determination of microgram quantities of trivalent americium in a nitric acid medium containing plutonium and uranium. The second-order derivative absorbance of the americium at 503.5 nm is used for the quantitative analysis. In the determination of 5.8 mu g/ml and 3.9 mu g/ml of americium, the presence of a 100-fold amount of plutonium and a 600-fold amount of uranium could be tolerated, respectively. The trivalent americium, in the concentration range of 1-11 mu g/ml has been determined with good precision. The detection limit was 0.3 mu g/ml at 3 times the standard deviation (3 sigma). The relative standard deviation was less than 2.1% for a sample of uranium-plutonium mixed oxide. The proposed method does not require the complicated separation step of plutonium and uranium.