Speaker
Description
Authors: Dirk Arnold 1, Ben Russell 2, Tea Zuliani 3, Valérie Lourenço 4, Betül Ari 5,Simon Jerome 6
1 PTB, Braunschweig, Germany, 2 NPL, Teddington, UK, 3 JSI, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 4 Université Paris-Saclay, CEA List, LNE-LNHB, Palaiseau, France, 5 TÜBİTAK, Ankara, Turkey, 6 NMBU, Ås, Norway
The European Green Deal’s ambition for zero pollution requires the development of highly sensitive techniques to detect ultra-low amounts of pollutants and to determine their isotope ratiosfor source attribution. Mass spectrometry is a key method for non-radioactive polluting elements determination and is of increasing importance for long-lived radionuclides. This project started in October 2022 and will run for three years and aims to bridge the gap between decay counting and atom counting methods and will establish new tools for tracing pollutants. Understanding of the advantages, limitations, measurement uncertainties and detection limits achievable by different mass spectrometer designswill be significantly improved using newly developed reference materials and SI-traceable measurement procedures and interlaboratory comparison exerciseswith an immediate impact for tracking pollution sources by commonly available mass spectrometers.
The scientific work of this project falls into four main areas:
• Establish and compare the selectivity and detection limits of different mass spectrometers by establishing the capabilities of different mass spectrometry designs using radionuclide standard solutions. The focus will be on relative instrument performance with respect to current measurement challenges around detection limits.
• Advancing stable and long-lived radiogenic isotope ratio measurements of environmental pollutants through the development of new and improved generic methods for stable and long-lived radioactive isotope ratio measurements by mass spectrometry with uncertainties that allow resolving natural mass dependent isotope fractionation.
• Development of two reference materials, one liquid and one solid, containing radioactive pollutants (237Np, 234,235,236,238U, 239,240Pu, 241Am and possibly 226Ra and 90Sr) addressing end users and stakeholders needs.
• Development of SI traceable certified reference material for inorganic environmental pollutants which will be designed according to the needs of the end users performing environmental analysis and monitoring. The production and certification of the material will be carried out in accordance with EN ISO 17034 standard (General requirements for the competence of reference material producers) requirements.
• The scientific outputs of the project will be disseminated via the scientific literature and by using the outcomes from the project through standards committees concerned with the determination of environmental pollutants.
The project (21GRD09 MetroPOEM) has received funding from the European Partnership on Metrology, co-financed by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme and from by the Participating States.
Funder name: European Partnership on Metrology
Funder ID: 10.13039/100019599
Grant number: 21GRD09 Metro POEM
