Review of the TLK Activities Related to Water Detritiation, Isotope Separation Based on Cryogenic Distillation and Development of Barriers Against Tritium Permeation

Abstract

The design of ITER tritium processing systems will benefit from experimental data and process validation based on experimental facilities that are ITER scale relevant. Several rigs and experimental facilities have been enhanced and developed at the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK) in order to explore a wide range of envisaged scenarios of tritium plant systems, such as the Water Detritiation System (WDS), Isotope Separation System (ISS) and highly tritiated water processing. In the last few years, detailed experimental investigations and process modeling have been conducted in relation to the Combined Electrolysis Catalytic Exchange and Isotope Separation (CECE-ISS) systems which were focused on evaluation of the impact of deuterium build-up and accumulation in the CECE system. An enhanced configuration of the ITER WDS has been developed, that allows mitigation of the effects due to deuterium accumulation and reduction of the tritium inventory within the electrolysis system. In addition, the benefits concerning the interface between the WDS and ISS are presented.

Significant efforts have been made to enhance the simulation tool TRIMO++ that was calibrated against the experimental results collected from the experimental rigs. The new features of the simulation tools are introduced as well.

The main references of a new method aiming to mitigate the tritium permeation from the tritium processes streams into the non-contaminated streams such as steam generators are introduced. The reference configuration of first phase of the experimental rigs and the preliminary experimental activities are presented as well.

Keywords:

• Water detritiation
• isotope separation
• tritium permeation

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the European Communities under the contract of Association between EURATOM and KIT. The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission.

The authors would like to thank all their colleagues from TLK for the support during this work.