by weight of >100 mesh soil.
One may think of ba/(atd) and ed/(at+d)
as the <100 and >100 mesh fraction Pu concentrations, respectively,
that have been corrected back to field conditions by taking into
account the proportion of <100 and >100 mesh soil in the total soil
sample.
[Note that at+td as reported to the authors are slightly less
than the total BM fraction weight (98.0 + 0.62 percent).
The assump-
tion is made here that no bias is introduced into the corrections by
this fact.
The total dry weight (before ball-milling) is given in
Table 8].
The BM fraction 739-240 Pu
concentrations
(Column h)
are plotted
against "total corrected" concentrations (Column g) in Fig. 18.
The resulting estimated linear regression line may be compared with
that in Fig.
17 where these same BM fraction data are plotted
versus the uncorrected sieved Pu concentrations
(Column b).
That is,
by correcting the <100 and >100 mesh Pu concentrations to field
conditions,
does one obtain concentrations equivalent or closer to
those obtained on the BM fraction?
If the BM and "total corrected"
concentrations are indeed “equal,"' then the two nonparallel lines in
Fig. 17 should become parallel and coincident in Fig. 18; i.e.,
one should find By ~ 0 and B, * 1 in Fig.
18.
One sees that Bo
does get closer to zero (-0.355 changes to -0.252) and B, is closer
to 1 (0.744 changes to 0.817), but By = -0.252 and By = 0.817 are
still significantly different from 0 and 1, respectively.
Hence, the
"corrected" concentrations obtained using Equation (1) above did not,
at least in this instance, fully correct to BM fraction results,
although some improvement was noted.
This raises the question as to
whether differences between laboratories might be partly responsible
for the lack of agreement between BM and sieved results in Fig.
9.
The "corrections" applied above would not remove any such laboratory
bias.
152