Simple pretreatment method for tritium measurement in environmental water samples using a liquid scintillation counter

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*; Nakamura, Kaori*; Ishimine, Akinobu*; Furukawa, Masahide*; Tanaka, Masahiro*; Akata, Naofumi*

Removal of impurities such as organic and other types of dissolved matters from environmental water samples is required for precise analysis of tritium with a liquid scintillation counting method. In general, a distillation method is a conventional one for tritium analysis in environmental water samples, but is a time-consuming process that takes 24 hours for removal of impurities. We have proposed a rapid pretreatment method for tritium analysis, that uses ion exchange resins. In this study, we performed batch experiments, to evaluate the effectiveness of the ion exchange resins on the tritium measurement. The results obtained demonstrated that removal of impurities in the sample water by ion exchange resins can be achieved during a short period of time (i.e., in 5 min).