Moderator detritiation at the Savannah River Plant

A study has been made of the technical and economic aspects of reducing tritium concentration in Savannah River Plant heavy-water moderator by 90%. A single detritiation plant would serve four operating reactors and the desired tritium reduction would be achieved in less than ten years. The process choice has narrowed to three processes. These involve a front-end extraction or preparation of molecular DT in a D2 stream, and a back-end fractional distillation of this stream followed by catalytic conversion to make 98% tritium T2