Cascade ultrafiltering of ²¹⁰Pb and ²¹⁰Po in freshwater using a tangential flow filtering system</p> </p>

Summary

A rapid method was developed using ultrafilters with a tangential flow filtering system for molecular size separation of naturally occurring ²¹⁰Pb and ²¹⁰Po in a freshwater sample. Generally, ultrafiltering of a large volume water sample for measuring the nuclides was too time consuming and not practical. The tangential flow filtering system made the filtering time short enough to adapt for in-situ ultrafiltering the large volume sample. In this method, a 20 liter water sample was at first passed through the 0.45mm pore size membrane filter immediately after sample collection to obtain suspended particle matter [>0.45mm particulate fraction (PRT)]. Two ultrafilters (Millipore Pellicon 2^Ò) were used sequentially. The nuclides in the filtrate were separated into three fractions: high molecular mass (100 kDa-0.45mm; HMM), low molecular mass (10 k-100 kDa; LMM) and ionic (<10 kDa; INC) fractions. It took 80 minutes to process the sample after collection. The cut-off molecular size of each ultrafilter was confirmed by size exclusion chromatographs (SEC) of the LMN and the HMM fractions. Adsorption of the nuclides and organic compounds in the sample onto the ultrafilters was negligibly small. Good reproducibility of the nuclide concentrations in each fraction was confirmed by repeated experiments. The method was successfully applied to obtaine the molecular size distributions of ²¹⁰Pb and ²¹⁰Po in an oligotrophic lake, Lake Towada located in the northern area of Japan.</p> </p>