Recovery of tritium from an aqueous lithium salt blanket on the NET fusion device

The Next European Torus (NET) requires a supply of tritium fuel that may not be entirely available from external sources. One option for breeding tritium within the machine itself is the Aqueous Lithium Salt Blanket (ALSB). In this paper, processes for recovering tritium from the blanket water are compared. These processes provide 90% detritiation of 500 kg/h of light water feed at an average concentration of 10 Ci/kg, yielding 0.5 g T/h. The recommended system uses a combination of water distillation (DW), vapor phase catalytic exchange (VPCE) and cryogenic distillation (CD). The DW unit is comparable in size to the D2O upgrader at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station and the CD unit is similar to that provided for the Chalk River Tritium Extraction Plant