Re: tritium x-rays

["Ron L. Kathren" <rkathren@beta.tricity.wsu.edu>]

Les --

In my earlier years I made some measuremnts of x-ray emission from 
tritium sources; there is, as I recall, considerable bremsstrahlung with 
an average energy of somewhere around 4 keV.  The average will in part be 
determined by many factors, including selfattenuation in the source.  But 
the point you make is valid -- the energy is low, and the dose to the 
skin can be quite high depending, of course, on source strength.

Looking forward to seeing you in Boston,

Ron

On Wed, 26 Apr 1995, Les Slaback, Health Physics wrote:

> 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
>