Accelerated radioactivation determination of mercury in non- concentrated water samples

Simple accelerated high-sensitive neutron activation methods have been developed for determining the content of mercury in small volumes of aqueous samples without their previous concentration. The analysis is carried out by means of extraction and chromatography. The radiochemical purity of the fractions separated is checked by gamma spectra. It has been shown that within the range of high concentrations of mercury the most intense spectral peaks 197Hg, sup(197m)Hg, 203Hg at gamma-quanta energies equal to 77, 69.134, 72.249 keV, respectively have been revealed. The sensitivity of determining Hg by means of the 77 keV peak amounts to about 1.5x10-10 g/ml