There were several researches using radioisotopes as tracer in dams and harbours in the late 1960 in Korea, but those didn't form a regular research group. No remarkable tracer work has been reported until the late 1980s when the industrial radiotracer technology was revived in Korea with the support from International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the radiotracer research group was launched in Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI). The main objective of the group is to develop and implement radiotracer techniques for local industries by means of field demonstrations and also to build the technical capability to support the environmental application of radiotracer. For tracer works, various equipments and softwares have been designed and produced to improve its applicability that can be achieved by its practical usefulness and the benefit which can not be promised by other conventional techniques. Most of radioisotopes for tracer have been produced from the High-flux Advanced Neutron Application Reactor (HANARO) in KAERI.

The most important advantage of radiotracer technologies can be characterized to its on-line applicability which means that it gives no perturbation to a system and the result represents the real situation. Through the R&D project for development of radiotracer technology the demonstrative experiments have been successfully carried out in a wide range of industries from petrochemical industries to marine coastal environment.
Many columns in oil refinery companies were scanned by using the automatic column scanner to find the cause and the position of malfunction, and the pipes of a boiler were inspected by the self-cramping pipe scanner to measure the amount of deposit inside. Korean tracer group has conducted a number of tracer experiments to measure flow rates, RTD characteristics and others to get the informations of industrial systems from troubleshooting and optimization. A radiotracer technique was applied to monitor the rotational movement of two piston rings in a cylinder during engine operation. The influence of the position of ring gap to the change of oil consumption was addressed by this application.

Monitoring and controling of environmental processes in the nature and the environmental facilities are very important in order to keep environment clean and minimize the impact of artificial activities of human.
The RTD of sludge in digesters was measured to find the cause of the low efficiency of sludge digester in a wastewater treatment facility. In addition, similar tracer experiment was carried out in the submerged biological reactor of a dye wastewater treatment facility to evaluate the flow behaviors in the reactors and to find any possible factors which may affect the process efficiency.
Since there are still many tracer techniques to be developed in Korea, the industrial tracer technologies should be studied continuously, but the environmental application should be more emphasized in future. Currently, the group is working on the more sophisticated area of radiotracer technology such as CFD validation and RTD visualization, Industrial process tomography and sediment transport study, etc.