Preliminary investigation of pretreatment methods for liquid scintillation measurements of environmental water samples using ion exchange resins

Nakasone, Shunya*; Yokoyama, Sumi*; Takahashi, Tomoyuki*; Ota, Masakazu  ; Kakiuchi, Hideki*; Sugihara, Shinji*; Hirao, Shigekazu*; Momoshima, Noriyuki*; Tamari, Toshiya*; Shima, Nagayoshi*; Atarashi-Andoh, Mariko  ; Fukutani, Satoshi*; Ishimine, Akinobu*; Furukawa, Masahide*; Tanaka, Masahiro*; Akata, Naofumi*

A quick preprocessing system for tritium analysis of environmental samples is important to judge environmental influence of tritium releases due to accident or tritium-handling facilities. Analysis of tritium in water samples with liquid scintillation counting method requires removal of impurities such as organic matter and ion species from water samples. Generally, a distillation method is adopted as a pretreatment of analysis for tritium; however, the distillation method is a time-consuming process. The aim of this study is to evaluate a rapid pretreatment method for tritium analysis with ion exchange resin. From batch and column experiments that used inland water and ion exchange resin, we confirmed removals of impurities of the water sample and that the removal of impurities was possible for a short time (by 5 minutes).