Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
1878020 Applied Radiation and Isotopes 2010 6 Pages PDF
Abstract

Liquid scintillation (LS) counting was undertaken as part of the primary standardization of 223Ra. Radium-223 decays with a half life of 11.43 d through a chain of shorter-lived daughter radionuclides, resulting in five alpha decays and three beta decays. The CIEMAT/NIST method of tritium efficiency tracing was employed, with the beta efficiencies being calculated using the program CN2004, developed by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). The total calculated LS efficiency, considering all daughter radionuclides, was approximately 598%. Separate experiments were performed to rule out loss of the 3.96 s 219Ra daughter from the cocktail and possible counting loss of the 1.78 ms 215Po daughter due to LS counter dead-time. No loss was observed in either experiment. In the final experiment an expanded uncertainty (k=2) of 0.55% was achieved. Results were in excellent agreement with confirmatory measurements performed by 2πα proportional counting. However, results are not in agreement with methods based on gamma ray measurements.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Physics and Astronomy Radiation
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