TABLE OF CONTENTS F.Ambe, S.Ambe, S.Enomoto
RIKEN (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research), Wako, Saitama 351 0198, Japan
In radioactive tracer technique, radioactive nuclides are used to follow the behavior of elements or chemical species in chemical and other processes. This is realized by means of radioactivity measurement. In 1913, Hevesy and Paneth succeeded in determining the extremely low solubility of lead salts by using naturally occurring 210Pb as a radioactive tracer. As various radioactive nuclides became artificially available, this technique has been widely employed in studies of chemical equilibrium and reactions as well as in chemical analysis. It is also an essential technique in biochemical, biological, medical, geological and environmental studies. Medical diagnosis and industrial process control are the fields of its most important practical application. In this chapter, fundamental ideas concerning radioactive tracers will be described followed by their application with typical examples. Detailed description on their application to life sciences and medicine is given in Volume 4 of this handbook.
The fundamental principle of the radioactive tracers is that the chemical behavior of radioactive isotopes is identical with that of their stable isotopes in any chemical process. Strictly speaking, the difference in atomic mass of radioactive and stable isotopes gives rise to a slight difference in both chemical reaction rate and equilibrium constant. This is the isotope effect (see Chapter 4 in Volume 2), which forms the basis of the isotope separation (see Chapter 5 in Volume 5). Except...
