Monitoring of radioactivity of nuclides in soil is important to reduce hazardous effects to the human health by the uptake and accumulation of the radionuclides because water-soluble radionuclides compounds in the soil migrate into vegetables, which are eaten almost every day, by complex process such as leaching, capillary rise, runoff, sorption, root uptake, and re-suspension. Generally, the radioactivity concentration in environmental samples is low, and many samples should be analyzed for the monitoring of radionuclides in the environment. Therefore, the development of a rapid and precise method for the determination of radioactivity in environmental samples is very important. The fusion method is a very effective way for a rapid and complete sample dissolution, and the sequential separation method helps speed up separation times for the separation of two or more nuclides in samples. In this study, the fusion technique was used to dissolve a soil sample completely, and uranium and thorium were separated by the sequential method. The separated uranium and thorium were analyzed using alpha-particle spectrometry. The developed method was evaluated by assessing the key validation parameters, and demonstrated a satisfactory quality level of the selected criteria of the performance. The developed method is expected to apply to the measurement of the low-level activity concentration of radionuclides in various solid samples with a high level of accuracy.

Determination of radioactivity of uranium and thorium in environmental samples by using fusion and sequential separation method, and its evaluation using key validation parameters

255th National Meeting (2018)

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