135

com
ls

.)

-

ooserved .

(slope) (mass)],

aff,

ton
7 Ei
= [9

(1)

corrected

where:
_

mass = mg/cm

2

slope = .1591 (From Appendix figure 1.)
efficiency = .47
An attempt was made to evaluate the fractionation effects
of pipetting only the smaller sized particles for the total

alpha measurement, compared to the activity of the entire sample.
For this, aliqucts of the whole and pipetted fractions of the Bravo
Crater "standard" samole and fcur lagoon samples were analyzea chemically
for plutonium.

The results are shown in Appendix Table 1.

Similar

fractionation was found between the four different lagoon samples reflecting
homogenization yet constant fractionation from ‘anual grinding.

These

particular samples were selected because they represented the extremes
and means of both the concentrations and the actual physical size

ranges encountered in lagoon sediments.

The surprising difference shown

between lagoon samples and the Bravo “standard” sample is probably due to
the very fine and well sorted sizes of the Bravo Crater material, which
was close to the limits of grinding in the undisturbed state.

These

average fraction factors, when multiplied by the constant 459.45 and by
the corrected activities obtained from equation 1, gave the activity of
whole coralline sediments in pCi/g as shown in Appendix Table 2, column A.

Select target paragraph3