A novel portable system for detecting and measuring tritium

A novel tritium detector configuration is described based on the anthracene scintillation method. Tritium-bearing samples are applied to a plate-bearing finely sublimed anthracene crystals and viewed in a field-able PMT-based reader against a standard plate. A microprocessor-based control and signal analysis system delivers a reading with a sensitivity of better than 5 nCi 3H in approximately 3 min, and 2.3 nCi in 10 min of counting.