Advantages:

As already mentioned radiotracers have special benefits compared to routine chemical or instrumental methods of analysis. A few special benefits of IDA are;

a) Isotope dilution analysis is more sensitive than several other analytical methods depending on the availability of radiotracer of desired specific activity. For many elements such as Zn, Ag, Hg, IDA has better detection limits than even neutron activation analysis. Of course sensitivity of IDA methods depends on the availability of carrier free or high specific activity radiotracer.

b) Whereas other instrumental methods fail to achieve these limits for complex matrices, IDA using appropriate radiation detectors could measure much smaller amounts.

c) Radiotracers also have potential specificity because of their unique decay properties and therefore chemical interferences are of little consequence.

d) Quantitative separation is not essential. In several wet chemical analyses involving trace amounts, it is almost impossible to achieve quantitative yield. Therefore, yield should be more than 50% without too many losses.

e) Nuclear detection equipments used for IDA are less expensive than several modern instruments. Instrumentation is quite simple since only gross activity measurement is needed.

f) IDA could be used for speciation studies within environmental and biological samples.

g) Decay procedure of radiotracers is not affected through ambient conditions of temperature, concentration of reagents, pH, etc and these could be used for determining dyes in natural water systems.