Spent nuclear fuel
must be carefully managed to prevent pollution
of the environment with radionuclides. Within the framework of correct
radioactive waste management, spent fuel rods are stored in cooling
pools to allow short-lived fission products to decay. If fuel rods
leak, they liberate radionuclides into the cooling water; therefore,
it is essential to determine radionuclide concentrations in the pool
water for monitoring purposes and to plan the decommissioning process.
In this work, we present, to our knowledge, the first passive sampling
technique for measures of actinides in spent nuclear fuel pools, based
on recently developed diffusive gradients in thin-film (DGT) configurations.
These samplers eliminate the need to retrieve and handle large samples
of fuel pool water for radiochemical processing by immobilizing their
targeted radionuclides in situ on the solid phase within the sampler.
This is additionally the first application of the DGT technique for
Cm measure. Herein, we make the calibrated effective diffusion coefficients
of U, Pu, Am, and Cm in borated spent fuel pool water available. We
tested these samplers in the fuel pool of a nuclear facility and measured
samples using accelerator mass spectrometry to provide high-precision
isotopic reports, allowing for the first independent implementation
of a recently developed technique for dating nuclear fuel based on
its Cm isotope signature.