Tritium release from catalytic breeder materials

In most current designs of D-T fusion reactor breeding blankets employing Li-based ceramic as breeder materials, the use of a helium sweep gas containing 0.1% of hydrogen is contemplated to extract tritium via isotopic exchange reactions. However, at lower temperatures, the release process of tritium from the breeders is known to be rather slow. For this reason, there is still a need to develop techniques that promote the release of bred tritium. In order to improve recovery of tritium from blankets over a wide range of temperature, platinum and palladium were deposited on the solid breeder materials such as Li4SiO4 and Li2TiO3, by the incipient wet impregnation method. Out of pile tritium release experiments were conducted using the ceramic breeders irradiated in a research reactor. The experimental results of this work reveal the benefit of the addition of catalytic additive metals, which is very effective to increase the tritium release rate from ceramic breeder materials especially at comparatively lower temperatures. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.