Re:Leak Testing of Radium sources

[Ninni Jacob <njacob@gsosun1.gso.uri.edu>]

Could someone tell me the correct way to estimate how much activity has
been removed in a leak test of a radium source?

I used a proportional counter and calculated the beta activity first.  But
that came out to be much higher than the gamma activity I obtained for
Ra-226 by counting the swipe on a Ge-Li detector.
Obviously it has something to do with the daughters.  But how do I
estimate the correct activity if I only had a proportional counter,
because one does not normally count swipes on a Ge-Li detector.
The only reason I counted it this time was because the activity from the
proportional counter came out to be greater than 0.005uCi.
So my question is : Is the source really leaking?