THE EXPERIMENTAL METHOD TO MONITOR ORGANICALLY BOUND TRITIUM

• Published in: Health physics (1958) Vol. 105; no. 1; p. S103
• Main Authors: Kabanov, DI, Kochetkov, O A, Semenova, M P
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01-07-2013
• ISSN: 0017-9078

There are some recent publications demonstrating that tritium can be found in organically bound media, which are more radiation hazardous tritium compounds than tritiated water. Therefore, it was important to find a way to develop a method of separate determination of tritium compounds in various media (discharges and effluents from nuclear power plants and in environmental media). SRC-FMBC has developed an original method to separate tritiated water from other dissolved tritium containing substances. This method includes consistent, two-stage filtration of tritium-containing water samples, using a charcoal filter for particles larger than 1 mu and membrane and reverse osmosis filters for nanoparticles larger than 0.1 nm. The diameter of tritiated water molecules, similar to ordinary water, is 0.095 nm; therefore, only water, including tritiated water, is able to pass through the mentioned reverse osmosis filter, while larger tritium-containing chemicals are cut and discharged through the drainage system of the filter. Tritium activity in water samples has been measured using Tri-Carb registered 3180, a computer-based desktop liquid scintillation luminescence analyzer, to be able to measure extremely low amounts of beta-active isotopes. The accuracy of this method is 16%, and the reproducibility rate is 3%. The presenters developed the installation, which promotes decision on the following tasks: obtaining separate fractions of tritium by type of chemical and molecular compounds and obtaining quantitative content of the organic tritium compounds and tritiated water in different media (air, water, vegetation, etc.). Results revealed that many samples contain mainly organic tritium compounds (the filters entrap 50-95% of tritium activity).