viewing overall activity distribution, but it is tedious and imprecise for quantifying hole counts and sizes.
Microscopic examination

of the film with transmitted green light causes the holes which

have completely etched through the red film to appear as brilliant

spots of light, readily visible at magnifications of 70-125x.

Incompletely etched tracks are also visible, but in the interests
of speed and simplicity, it was decided to count only those which
had etched completely through.
If this is done, there is little
advantage to be gained from higher magnification.
Films were also
scanned with the Quantimet analysis system.
Although it is no
faster than manual counting and requires access to sophisticated
instrumentation, this technique permits acquisition and storage in
computer-compatible form of quantitative distribution and track

dimension information.

Agreement between manual and automated

counting techniques could be brought to within about 5% if careful
attention were paid to setting analyzer detection thresholds to
agree with the microscopist's track acceptance criteria; without
such effort, differences of about 15% were typical.
Representative
data are presented in Table 1 and discussed below.
Standard source exposures:

Table 1 summarizes the results obtained

from exposures of films under various conditions to a Pu-plated

planchet with 616 dpm 2399240py and 314 dpm 238pu in an active
plated area with a diameter of 1.8 cm.
All films had both an area

exposed to the source (normally through a 12.8 um Mylar energy

degrader, although exposures with no degrader and with 1.8 cm of
air were also made) and a similar area reserved for blank determination.
All completely etched tracks in an area 500-600 mm? contain-~
ing the exposed portion were counted, and a similar count was made
in an equivalent blank area.
This total count approach was taken
to avoid problems with nonuniformity of source distribution; counts

made by microscope are coded "M," while those obtained from the
image analyzer system are coded "IA." Figures 1-3 are image analyzer
plots of the distributions of track diameters

(or the diameter of a

sphere of equivalent projected area for asymmetric tracks) for
representative samples.
Figure 1 is the blank of film XXX, Figure 2
is for source exposure XXIX (see Table 1), where Ea ranged from 0
to 3.7 MeV, and Figure 3 is for source exposure XXXV, with an Eo

range of 2.05 to 3.70 MeV.

Environmental sample exposures:
Samples of previously analyzed
soils and sediments were used to investigate film sensitivities and
exposure techniques for environmental samples.
Table 2 gives the

results obtained from relatively long exposure of the films to
dried but otherwise unprocessed sediments from Bravo Crater in
Bikini Atoll lagoon.

The film pieces, mounted on slides, were

gently covered with sediment

(either in direct contact or with an

intervening Mylar energy degrader), left for three weeks, and then
rinsed off and etched.
Portions of each film were selected at
random, measured, and the tracks counted.
For one measurement, a
gridded slide was used and the tracks in each square millimeter

596

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