Savannah River Laboratory contribution to the Chalk River experimental HT release of June 1987

Seventeen years ago, a series of experiments were conducted at Bruyeres-Le-Chatel by French scientists interested in atmospheric diffusion. The scientists used tritium as a tracer in these tests. The results showed nearly complete oxidation of the gas by the time the released material had been carried 10 kilometers from the source. It became clear that if the results were general, the doses projected for fusion reactors would be greatly increased over what had been expected from earlier experience with HT gas. For this reason, the Next European Torus (NET) fusion program funded a series of experiments to look further at tritium oxidation in the environment. SRL participation in the tests provided an opportunity to make field comparisons of the SRL design tritium gas samplers and also provided vegetation that had been exposed under controlled conditions which could be used to study the incorporation of tritium into vegetation organics, the subject of ongoing SRL research. 25 refs., 4 figs., 2 tabs