DEVELOPMENT OF RADIONUCLIDE ANALYSIS BASED ON HIGHLY SENSITIVE LASER ABSORPTION SPECTROSCOPY TOWARD SAFETY DECOMMISSIONING

Abstract

For the safe decommissioning of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, acquiring information on the composition of radioactive nuclides as well as their quantities are required. While an analysis based on a radiation measurement is one of the effective tools, the trace detection of the nuclides with a long half-life as well as the alpha radionuclides is not feasible. For this purpose, mass spectrometry is generally used as an alternative, which requires an ultra-high vacuum system, and therefore rapid measurement/continuous monitoring on site is rather difficult. Substitutionally, the methods based on highly sensitive laser absorption spectroscopy with an optical resonator have a large possibility to realize the rapid analysis of radionuclides with a compact and transportable apparatus. In this paper, our recent progress regarding the development of a glow-discharge cavity ring-down spectrometer for the real-time nuclides analysis for the aerosol particles generated by laser processing is presented.