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Applications of Liquid Scintillation Counting

Waste Disposal Issues in Scintillation Counting

An aspect of LSC which must be considered in experimental design, is waste disposal. Unlike solid scintillation, LSC adds components to the sample increasing the volume of radioactive material by up to 1000 fold. The components of the LSC cocktail may represent a hazard or a disposal problem in addition to the radioactivity. For many experiments, only a small percentage of the samples counted will have significant radioactivity, so disposal of the LSC is the predominating issue. Fortunately, biodegradable LSC cocktails have been developed, such as National Diagnostics' Ecoscint fluids and Uniscint BD, which substantially reduce the difficulty of disposing of LSC waste.

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