Chemical analysis of purified uranium

Uranium metal was zone refined under low contamination conditions as far as possible. Chemical analysis of the purified uranium was performed using the inductive coupled plasma emission spectrometry (ICP). The problem that emission spectra of the uranium conceal those of analyzed impurities was settled by extraction of the uranium using tri-n-butylphosphate(TBP). The result shows that some metallic impurities such as Pb, Mn, Cu etc. evaporated by the r.f. heating and other usual metallic impurities moved to the end of rod with molten zone. Therefore we conclude that the zone refining technique is much effective to the removal of metallic impurities and we obtained high purified uranium metal of 99.99% up with regarding to metallic impurities.