Design and Field Tests of Scintillation Spectrometer for Continuous Radon in Soil-gas Monitoring

This work presents the realization and the results of pilot field tests of a detector designed for continuous monitoring of
²²²
Rn in soil-gas. The detector is based on scintillation spectrometry with plastic scintillators and pulse-shape discrimination (PSD) of the alpha- and beta- particle pulses of
²²²
Rn and its progeny. The detector is portable and can be placed and buried in boreholes up to 2 m in depth. The salient feature of the detector is that it does not use any kind of air sampling which allows unperturbed and continuous
²²²
Rn in soil-gas measurements. The results from a 12 days pilot field test show that, due to its advantageous design and PSD discrimination capabilities, the detector has low background and good sensitivity to detect the diurnal radon in soil-gas fluctuations at 1m depth. Such detectors can find applications in geology and seismology, for example in the experimental research of the potential relationship between the
²²²
Rn in soil-gas anomalies and seismic activity and the corresponding studies on the usage of soil-gas
²²²
Rn as an earthquake precursor.