Progress of Cryogenics and Isotopes Separation , ISSN: 1582-2575
2002, Volume 5, Issue 9+10

Experimental Study About Hydrogen Isotopes Storage on Titanium Bed

Abstract

As knew, the Nuclear Power Plant Cernavoda equipped with a Canadian reactor, CANDU type, is the most powerful tritium source from Europe. On long term, due to a 6*10 exp16 Bq/year, Cernavoda area will be contaminated as increasing the tritium quantity. Also, the continuous contamination of heavy water from the reactor, induce a diminish of moderation’s capacity. Therefore, it consider that is improper the use of heavy water after 40 Ci/kg in the moderator and 2 Ci/kg in the cooling fluid. For these reasons, we have developed a detritiation technology, based on catalytic isotopic exchange and cryogenic distillation. Tritium will be removed from the tritiated heavy water, so it appears the necessity of storage of tritium in a special vessel that can provide a high level of protection and safety of environment and personal.
There was tested several metals as storage beds for hydrogen isotopes. One of the reference materials used for storage of hydrogen isotopes is uranium, a material with a great storage capacity, but unfortunately it’s a radioactive metal and also can react with the impurities from storage gas. Other metals and alloys as ZrCo, Ti, FeTi are also adequate as storage beds at normal temperature. The paper presents studies about the reaction between hydrogen and titanium used as storage bed for the hydrogen isotopes resulted after the detritiation of tritiated heavy water. The experiments that were made use as process gas hydrogen at different storage parameters.