Using soils for accident dosimetry; A Preliminary study using optically stimulated luminescence from quartz

Fujita, Hiroki; Jain, M.*; Murray, A. S.*

Single-aliquot regenerative OSL (SAR OSL) method was developed specifically for measuring background dose in natural quartz extracted from soils collected around Tokai-mura. The objective was to assess the potential of using soils for retrospective assessment of a radiation accident. The SAR data showed good reproducibility and dose recovery, and there were no evidence of fading of quartz signal based on the "delayed" dose recovery experiments. The dose of minimum detection limit (MDL) was 0.1 Gy. The background doses were generally the range of the MDL - few Gy, and no clear trend in dose depth profile was observed. An absence of clear trend might be indicative of ongoing soil activity resulting remixing of grains from the surface. From these results, we conclude that the SAR OSL dosimetry using natural quartz extracted from soil could evaluate accident dose.