RE: Measurement of Tritium by Liquid Scintillation

[#jhkaye <jhkaye@ix.netcom.com>]

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From: 	Price, Carol J[SMTP:PriceCarolJ@exchange.uams.edu]
Sent: 	Saturday, May 02, 1998 3:29 PM
To: 	Multiple recipients of list

Can anyone help me with the best way to measure H-3 in urine?

Carol,

As mentioned by others, the simplest way to measure H-3 in urine is by liquid scintillation counting.  As an option to distillation, as mentioned by Donivan Porterfield at LANL, when I was working at PNL (now PNNL), we successfully decolorized urine by mixing it with finely divided activated charcoal and filtering it or centrifuging it.  This reduced the quenching that typically occurs when measuring urine directly.  We also spiked an aliquot of each sample with a known amount of H-3, which was analyzed along with each sample.  This was simple and worked very well.

James H. Kaye, Ph.D.
jhkaye@ix.netcom.com