Production method of environmental tracer 132Cs by accelerator-based neutron

Tadahiro Kin; Naoto Araki; Md Kawchar Ahmed Patwary; Katsumi Aoki; Kosuke Yoshinami; Masaya Yamaguchi; Masatoshi Itoh; Yukinobu Watanabe

doi:10.1051/epjconf/202023920002

Proceedings

Open Access

EPJ Web of Conferences 239, 20002 (2020)
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202023920002

Production method of environmental tracer ¹³²Cs by accelerator-based neutron

Tadahiro Kin¹^*, Naoto Araki¹, Md Kawchar Ahmed Patwary¹, Katsumi Aoki¹, Kosuke Yoshinami¹, Masaya Yamaguchi¹, Masatoshi Itoh² and Yukinobu Watanabe¹

¹ Department of Advanced Energy Engineering Science, Kyushu University, Japan
² Cyclotron and Radioisotope Center, Tohoku University, Japan

^* e-mail: kin@aees.kyushu-u.ac.jp

Published online: 30 September 2020

Abstract

Cesium-132 has proposed as an alternative tracer of ¹³⁷Cs for environment study on radioactive cesium dynamics released by a nuclear power plant accident. In the present study, we conducted a production experiment of the ¹³²Cs by means of accelerator-based neutron method to investigate production amount and radioactive purity. A 12-g Cs₂CO₃ sample was irradiated by the accelerator-based neutron via the C(d,n) reactions by 1.2 µA of 30-MeV deuterons. As a result, 102 kBq/g of ¹³²Cs was obtained with higher than 98.5% radioactive purity. Following that, a feasibility study of cesium dynamics measurement in andosol soil was performed. We found distribution of absorption of cesium in andosol soil can be clearly measurable by the produced ¹³²Cs tracer.

© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2020

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.