Tritium gettering from air with hydrogen uranyl phosphate

Abstract

The managers of all tritium facilities now worry about their emissions into the atmosphere. The only method for cleaning tritium out of air is to catalyze the formation of tritiated water which is adsorbed, along with the overwhelming bulk of naturally occurring water vapor, on a zeolite molecular sieve. This method generally costs several million dollars for a small system, because of the necessary steel ducting, compressors and holding tanks. We have long had the dream of finding another getter that might be cheaper to use and would, hopefully, not make tritiated water (HTO). In a previous paper, we discovered that hydrogen uranyl phosphate (HUP, with the formula HUO/sub 2/PO/sub 4/ x 4H/sub 2/O) getters 1 ppM of tritium gas out of moist air. This makes HUP the first known ''direct'' tritium getter to work in air. However, the tritium enters a hydroxyl network within the HUP, so that it is effectively still in ''water'' form within the HUP. Worse yet, we found up to 10% tritiated water formed during the previous gettering experiments. HUP is unusual in possessing the exceptionally low vapor pressure of 0.6 torr water vapor at 298/sup 0/K. This allows HUP to be used in fairly dry environments. 14 refs., 3 figs., 2 tabs.