Cs137 in biomass pelletized wood ash

[cicastol]

During winter i'm running a pelletized wood stove , my pellets came from Lithuania and Cs137 (always presents Chernobyl NPP fallout) in ash becomes concentrate at 10 to 200 ratio , here a brief results from 32Ks integration time.

[GigaBecquerel]

Wow, that's an impressive amount of contamination!
I never would have guessed that it surpasses the k40 peak.

[Svilen]

Nice result. What is the weight and the activity of the sample?

[cicastol]

Thanks,
sample weight is 248Gr of compressed ash in a 0,6Lt Marinelli becker , i need to make some calculations to estimate the activity, but i guess is under 1000Bq/Kg .

[cicastol]

Rough activity estimation is 2285+-457Bq/Kg, but the density is very different (almost half) from the soil I had previously calculated, so I don't know how actual it can be...

[Sesselmann]

Ciro,

Nice, you could cast some of that into epoxy and sell it as calibration samples. :)

Steven

[Svilen]

Thank you for your answer Ciro. I also meant the approximate activity of course, it is not that easy to determine it corectly.

[gwgw]

I was also interested in taking spectrums from wood ash, but the low density is a real problem (considering my setup has rather limited volume for samples). Found out I can compress it much better if I pour in some water and then after pressing, I let it dry. Much better than what I can get by just manually pressing it to compress. When it dries out, it looks almost "solid" though quite brittle...like gypsum.

[Go-Figure]

Nice one Ciro, this is something I've never thought about.
I don't use pelletized wood for heating, but maybe I can get myself some! :)

Massimo