Re: Tritium Adsorption

[Schoenhofer <schoenho@via.at>]

At 12:19 03.01.1997 -0600, you wrote:
>I have been involved in the decontamination and decommissioning
> of five H-3 contaminated facilities in the last three years and the one
> pattern that I have seen is that there is no pattern.
> 
>         There are many variables that affect sorption, including
> exposure time, time since exposure, relative humidity, atmospheric
> pressure, original concentration at exposure, air turnover rate, etc.
> 
>........................................

Thanks for communicating your experience with tritium to radsafe. Yes,
tritium is a very lousy radionuclide - you very often find it where it
should not be and it never behaves like predicted.

I can mention a biological analogon: When I did experiments, determining the
transfer from watches with plastic encasing and tritium luminous dials to
the body, I noticed that my body took up within a few weeks enough tritium
to achieve an equilibrium level of tritium of approximately 3000 Bq/l urine.
This was in the beginning of September in the relatively cool Vienna. When I
travelled to the still warm South of Spain to lecture at a summer school at
Huelva the concentration suddenly dropped by approximately 20 %, though I
still had the watch on my wrist. Was it the warm weather which made me
sweat? Was it rapid exchange with water when the body is submersed for some
time? (This is a scientific description of "swimming in the ocean"....)

It seems to me that factors like that might have to be considered when
estimating the dose from incorporation of tritium - maybe of other
radionuclides as well.

One last remark: Are there not some people who pray for the "clean" energy
from nuclear fusion, which should replace the "dirty" energy from nuclear power?

Franz
Schoenhofer
Habichergasse 31/7
A-1160 WIEN
AUSTRIA/EUROPE
Tel./Fax:	+43-1-4955308
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e-mail:		schoenho@via.at