Determination of Cs-137 in seawater surrounding Peninsular Malaysia - a case study

The studies of Cs-137 content in the seawater surrounding Peninsular Malaysia had been carried out as part of the Malaysia Marine Radioactivity Database Project. The results of the measurement will serve as the baseline data and reference level to Malaysia. A numbers of sampling locations, including coastal and offshore at the East Coast (South China Sea) and West Coast (Straits of Malacca) of Peninsular Malaysia had been selected for the study. From each location at the coastal area, water samples were collected from the surface of the seawater. Meanwhile, for the offshore area, water samples have been collected at three different depths. Due to usual low concentration of Cs-137 in the marine environment, large volumes of seawater were collected and the co-precipitation technique was employed to concentrate the Cs-137. The activity of Cs-137 was determined by measuring the peak area under photo peak of the gamma spectrum at 661 keV, which is equivalent to the gamma intensity corrected to the HpGe detection efficiency and percentage of gamma ray abundance of the Cs-134. At each study location, there were no significant differences for Cs-137 activities at 95% confidence interval. The activities of Cs-137 found to be quite uniformly distributed in the range of 2.33 to 5.00 Bq/m3 and 1.76 to 4.76 Bq/m3 for the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca, respectively. (Author)