Development of methodology for drying environmental radioactive samples

Abstract

In the Gamma Spectrometry technique of environmental samples, a commonly used practice used is drying, which objective is to mitigate the self-attenuation caused by the water naturally contained in the sample, in order to search the spectrometry from a comparable matrix, in line with the reproducibility of the results generated .

The experiments were carried out using an analog oven, varying the temperature by 5ºC per sample, allowing the study of radionuclide loss during the exposure of the analyzed object to the drying temperature of samples. The objective is to acquire the gamma spectrum of sand samples from Areia Preta – Guarapari/ES beach before and after exposing the sample to different temperatures, using a High Purity Germanium detector (HPGe), based on the hypothesis that there may be leakage of radionuclides in the drying process, and thus verify if the current drying methodology influences on the levels of ²²⁸Ra, ²²⁶Ra e ⁴⁰K of the analyzed sample.