Commissioning of the Catalytic Plasma Exhaust Clean-Up Facility Caprice and First Experimental Results

Abstract

A fuel clean-up process for all plasma exhaust gases from DT fusion machines, based on catalytic conversion reactions combined with permeation of hydrogen isotopes through palladium/silver, has been developed. The complete process has already been proven with relevant concentrations of tritium at laboratory scale. On the basis of the results obtained the technical facility 'CAPRICE' was designed, and is now under tritium operation at the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK). The facility is being used to demonstrate the process on a target throughput of 10 mol/h DT and 1 mol/h tritiated and non-tritiated impurities. Full scale experiments with hydrogen and deuterium have been completed to verify the design parameters of the facility and to gain detailed knowledge on the performance of the different subsystems under a variety of experimental conditions. Decontamination factors were obtained from these experiments as well as from first tritium runs employing about 350 Ci (0.5 %) tritium in deuterium.