Towards calibration transfer for quantitative analysis of nuclear materials by LIBS

To ensure the quality of their products, manufacturers of nuclear materials currently rely on wet chemistry methods coupled with ICP-MS and ICP-AES. These methods are slow and sometimes hard to implement, which leads the manufacturers to seek new possibilities of online, fast and direct preliminary quality control. Thus, the issue of quantifying metal impurities in both uranium and plutonium matrices by LIBS has been raised. But the lack of calibrated samples and the harsh security constraints hinder any possibility of complete analytical development on these materials. Therefore, we propose a method relying on calibration transfer from several non-nuclear metal matrices to uranium and plut…