tritium x-rays

["Les Slaback, Health Physics" <SLABACK@micf.nist.gov>]

With multicurie tritium sources (both tritium adsorbed into titanium and
tritium encapsulated in glass) I have detected x-rays with G-M and ion chamber
detectors. In fact we used to verify the tritium loading of the accelerator
targets with this technique.
The discriminator on a low energy NaI may prevent detection with that
detector.
In the case of the tritium loaded sign if you cannot seen anything with a
GM I would presume that the glass is thick enough to block the x-rays.  The
light sources encapsulated in glass were fairly thinly encapsulated.

The note as to the energy range of the x-rays was interesting.  Is this based
on measurement or a reference?  I always meant to do a measurement but did
not get around to it.  But I would have thought the effective x-ray energy
would be higher, given the strong energy dependence on beta energy in
producing these.

The note regarding tritium contamination causing interference in the Am-241
measurements was curious, since it would take close to a curie of tritium
to produce detectable reading.  A hell-of-a-lot of contamination.

SLABACK@MICF.NIST.GOV
   ...a little risk, like a bit of spice, adds flavor to life