Abstract
Understanding the behaviour of 137Cs in the soil subsurface is important to avoiding health-associated risks of radionuclides in our environment. For this, we studied the tropical Malaysian soil to determine the factors affecting 137Cs sorption level; we evaluated sorption level using distributed coefficients and soil physico-chemical properties on 45 soil samples from 5 sites. We found the range 202 L kg−1 to 5919 L kg−1 for the distribution coefficients and the geometric mean of 1039 L kg−1 . Further, our results show that the main factor contributing 137Cs sorption in the tropical Malaysian soil is cation exchange capacity (CEC).