The Closed Tritium Cycle of the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe

Abstract

The Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK) was commissioned with tritium in 1994 and since then has continuously improved its infrastructure and has expanded its experimental activities. With a fully closed tritium cycle and the license to handle 40 g of tritium TLK is an almost unique experimental facility. More than 10 glove box systems with a total volume of about 125 m3 are operated to house experiments and infrastructure facilities on an area of more than 1000 m2. Today TLK has about 23 g of tritium on site. The paper describes the closed tritium loop of the TLK infrastructure and its links to different experiments. Some experience gained during operation of TLK is also presented.