5. Comparison of Laboratory and in-situ methods

The in-situ measurements, although quick and relatively inexpensive, are affected by such things as environmental conditions and soil inhomogeneity, which make interpretation of the data difficult. These effects can be minimized by laboratory analysis of soil samples, but the process is slow and more expensive. Knowing these limitations, both methods can be useful in the remedial action programs.

In-situ techniques and other nuclear-related methods have reached a high level of analytical performance and offer certain advantages over other more traditional characterization procedures, such as:

• Fast determination of contaminant concentrations/activities in many spots/areas across the contaminated site without time-consuming sample collection and preparation procedures.


• Fine tuning of the contaminant spatial distribution, with immediate real time identification of areas of interest (‘hot-spot’ areas), allowing further investigation of these areas with a better spatial resolution sampling.


• Cost reduction for the investigation of all the stages of an assessment, and remediation process. Larger size of the effectively inspected sample contributes to a drastic reduction of the time required for measurements and results in more representative results.


• Optimization of sampling strategies for more accurate laboratory analysis.