Preliminary investigation of pretreatment methods for liquid scintillation measurements of environmental water samples using ion exchange resins

This paper presents an evaluation of a rapid pretreatment method for tritium analysis, that uses ion exchange resins (the batch method). The standard water samples were prepared with river water collected in Okinawa, Japan. Powdex resin was used in this study, which is an ion exchange resins in the form of powder beads. First, 100mL of the standard sample was stirred with the cation exchange (PCH) and anion exchange (PAO) resins, as well as with activated carbon. To determine the optimal stirring time, we tested stirring times of 5, 10, 20 and 30 min. Additionally, to determine a suitable amount of ion exchange resin for environmental water samples, variations in the amount of resin and activated carbon were tested. Under the conditions of Experiment-3 (0.3 g, 0.3 g and 0.6 g of PCH, PAO and activated carbon, respectively) and with a stirring time of 5 min, electrical conductivity values of less than 1mSm^-1 were achieved. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the removal of impurities in the sample water by ion exchange resins and confirm that such an effect can be achieved during a short period of time (i.e., in 5min).