UCL Environmental Radiometric Facility

The UCL Environmental Radiometric Facility is located within the Department of Geography, University College London and uses low-background hyper-pure germanium gamma spectrometers capable of measuring low-level environmental radioactivity.

The facility currently employs two ORTEC^® HPGe GWL series coaxial well-type gamma detectors and one HPGe LOAX planar coaxial detector, each housed in a 100mm thick lead shield. Resulting spectra may be analysed for different environmental radioisotopes including ²¹⁰Pb, ²²⁶Ra, ¹³⁷Cs, ¹³⁴Cs, ²⁴¹Am, ⁷Be and ⁴⁰K.

Since 2005, when the facility was first set up, the main application has been for the radiometric dating of lake sediments and peats via the measurement of ²¹⁰Pb, ¹³⁷Cs and ²⁴¹Am. This enables chronologies of 100 - 150 years to be accurately determined. The facility has undertaken these analyses for research projects based in  many areas of the world.

This approach can also be used in a number of other ways to investigate the distribution of radioisotopes in the environment through measurements of a wide range of environmental and ecological samples.