Development of Tritium Plant System for Fusion Reactors. Achievements in the 14-year US-Japan Collaboration.

Abstract

Fuel processing technology and tritium safe-handling technology have been developed through US/DOE-JAERI collaboration from 1987 till 2001, and the technologies to construct the tritium plant system of ITER have been made currently available. This paper overviews the major achievements of this collaborative researches over fourteen years, which were performed mainly at the Tritium Systems Test Assembly (TSTA) of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The tritium plant system consists mainly of a fuel processing system, which includes a fuel cycle system and a blanket tritium recovery system, and a tritium confinement/removal system. The fuel cycle system recovers fuel from plasma exhaust gas and recycles it. In the collaboration, major key components and subsystems were developed, and the performance of the integrated system was successfully demonstrated over its one-month operation in which plasma exhaust model gas was processed at a processing rate of up to 1/6 level of the ITER. The technological basis of the fuel cycle system was thus established. Blanket tritium recovery technology was also successfully demonstrated using the TSTA system. Through the successful safeoperation of the TSTA, reliability of tritium confinement/removal system was verified basically. In addition, much data to confirm or enhance safety were accumulated by experiments such as intentional tritium release in a large room. Furthermore,distribution of tritium contamination in the vacuum vessel of the TFTR, a large tokamak of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), was investigated in this work.