Use of tritium accelerator mass spectrometry for tree ring analysis

被引:15
作者
Love, AH [1 ]
Hunt, JR
Roberts, ML
Southon, JR
Chiarappa-Zucca, ML
Dingley, KH
机构
[1] Univ Calif Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA
[2] Lawrence Livermore Natl Lab, Ctr Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Livermore, CA 94551 USA
[3] Univ Georgia, Ctr Appl Isotope Studies, Athens, GA 30602 USA
[4] Univ Calif Irvine, Dept Earth Syst Sci, Irvine, CA 92697 USA
关键词
D O I
10.1021/es015837o
中图分类号
X [环境科学、安全科学];
学科分类号
08 ; 0830 ;
摘要
Public concerns over the health effects associated with low-level and long-term exposure to tritium released from industrial point sources have generated the demand for better methods to evaluate historical tritium exposure levels for these communities. The cellulose of trees accurately reflects the tritium concentration in the source water and may contain the only historical record of tritium exposure. The tritium activity in the annual rings of a tree was measured using accelerator mass spectrometry to reconstruct historical annual averages of tritium exposure. Milligram-sized samples of the annual tree rings from a Tamarix located at the Nevada Test Site are used for validation of this methodology. The salt cedar was chosen since it had a single source of tritiated water that was well-characterized as it varied over time. The decay-corrected tritium activity of the water in which the salt cedar grew closely agrees with the organically bound tritium activity in its annual rings. This demonstrates that the milligram-sized samples used in tritium accelerator mass spectrometry are suited for reconstructing anthropogenic tritium levels in the environment.
引用
收藏
页码:2848 / 2852
页数:5
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