Effects of the composition of standard reference material on the accuracy of determinations of 210Pb and 137Cs in soils with gamma spectrometry

The effect of the composition of the used standard reference material (SRM) on results of determination of fallout radionuclides in soil samples was studied. Using five soil types as SRMs, we measured the specific activity of 210Pb and 137Cs in six target samples of Chestnut soil. It was observed that the determination of the 210Pb activity in the samples depended on the chemical composition of SRMs used to create the efficiency curves. Thus, using SRMs similar in chemical composition to the target samples should improve accuracy in the determination of 210Pb in environmental samples.