Inventorying the radionuclides in spent cartridge filters from the primary circuit of a nuclear research reactor by the dose-to-activity method

Abstract

The high activity of spent cartridge filters from the cooling water polishing system of a nuclear research reactor precludes, in routine work of a waste characterization program, the usual method of radiochemical analysis of filter samples. For this waste, the dose-to-activity method, using a gamma spectrometer and a dose rate meter, is an alternative for the determination of the activities of the gamma emitters with acceptable accuracy. The ratio of photon peak-areas from different radionuclides, corrected by the detector energy-dependent efficiency, allowed estimating the proportions between the activities of the different radionuclides present. Finally, the simulation of the counting geometry, using the point-kernel method to estimate the air dose rate resulting from an arbitrary concentration of those radionuclides and the comparison of the calculated with the measured air dose rate have yielded the needed estimates of the activity concentrations. The aim of this paper is to report the development of the method applied for the determination of the concentration of the gamma-emitters present in cartridge filters from the IEA-R1 Nuclear Research Reactor.