Apparatus development for measurement of (134)Cs and (137)Cs radioactivity of soil contaminated by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident.

We developed an apparatus containing a NaI(Tl) scintillator to measure the (134)Cs and (137)Cs radioactivity of soil contaminated by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. The unfolding method with the least-squares technique was used to determine the radioactivity. Detector responses for each radionuclide in soil were calculated with EGS5 code for the unfolding method. The radionuclides that were measured were (40)K, (134)Cs, (137)Cs, (208)Tl, (214)Bi, and (228)Ac. The measured spectrum agreed well with the spectrum calculated from the response matrix and measured radioactivities. The unfolding method allows us to use the NaI(Tl) scintillator despite the overlap of peaks.