An optimized process for tritium-containing waste water collection of High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor

Highlights: • An optimized process for tritium-containing waste water collection of High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor was developed. • The optimized process and verification experiment using the HTR-10 were presented in detail. • A large quantity of high-dose tritium-containing waste water was successfully collected in commissioning experiment of the improved HTR-10. • The optimized process was proved to be reliable to avoid the large emission of radioactive waste water to the environment. - Abstract: An optimized process for tritium-containing waste water collection of High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) was developed and experimentally verified using the 10 MW High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor-test module (HTR-10). Compared with the previous process, an auxiliary molecular sieve bed was added in helium purification regeneration system and new operation process was proposed to collect tritium-containing waste water. In this paper, the optimized process and verification experiment were presented in detail. In commissioning experiment of the improved HTR-10, a large quantity of high-dose tritium-containing waste water was successfully collected in the water separator of helium purification regeneration system, with the specific activity being 6.1 × 10⁹ Bq/L. The verification experiment confirms that the optimized process is effective and reliable for the demonstration plant design of High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor-Pebble bed module (HTR-PM) to avoid the large emission of detrimentally radioactive waste water to the environment