Setup and commissioning of a combined water detritiation and isotope separation experiment at the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe

Abstract

The European union in kind supply for the ITER fuel cycle development consists, among others, of the water detritiation system (WDS) and the isotope separation system (ISS). In order to mitigate the release of tritium to the environment, these systems are combined by feeding hydrogen exhaust from the ISS into the WDS for final processing. Therefore, the WDS is the final tritium barrier before releasing hydrogen (H2) exhaust to the environment.The TRENTA 4 scaled prototype facility at TLK is based on combination of the combined electrolysis and catalytic exchange (CECE) process and a cryogenic distillation (CD) process. All components are fully tritium compatible and controlled using a state of the art control system for process automation, backed up by an additional dedicated safety system.The paper will give a detailed overview of the current experimental facility including all process components. Furthermore the paper will present the results of the functional test of the WDS/ISS combination using protium and deuterium, as well the results of the first commissioning runs using HTO of approximately 5×109Bqkg−1 activity concentration.