Comparison of Ge(Li) and Anti-Compton Systems for Measurements of Environmental Samples

There are numerous reasons for performing environmental measurements for routine health or safety monitoring and to determine the movement of trace elements or radionuclides through our environment to man. This is often a requirement for the licensing of nuclear power reactors, as well as many other meteorological or environmental research experiments. In this paper a variety of sensitive low-level counting systems have been discussed from an analyst's viewpoint, centering on a variety of NaI(Tl) and Ge(Li) gamma ray spectrometers. The coincident gamma-ray emitters are most sensitively detected through NaI(Tl) multidimensional gamma ray spectrometry, while single gamma ray emitters are very sensitively detected with Ge(Li) detector systems. NaI(Tl) detector systems are superior in general for environmental measurements.