Design, Construction and Testing of a Practical-Scale Palladium Membrane Reactor for Cracking Tritiated Water

A palladium membrane reactor (PMR) system has been successfully designed, constructed, tested, and put into service at the Savannah River Site for recovering elemental tritium from tritiated water on Disposable Molecular Sieve Beds (DMSB), filled during tests of the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor. This PMR system is the first known large-scale application of the PMR to routine, production recovery of tritium from tritiated water. This PMR incorporated several new design features to achieve high conversion efficiency of tritiated water to elemental tritium, while operating at the high flow rates and low pressure drops needed for a practical production-scale operation