When the issue of depleted uranium (DU) presence in the environment emerged, methods for the analytical discrimination of DU against natural uranium had to be developed. We present here a simple gamma-spectrometric method, based on the ~(238)U-~(226)Ra activity (non) equilibrium. Preliminary calculations that are still under way lead to the result that the lower limit of detection of DU is about 10 Bq kg~(-1) for a 50 ks measurement and thus the method is appropriate for the determination of small amounts (≈ 100 Bq kg~(-1)) of DU in environmental samples. The method is tested on about 90 soil samples.
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