Tritium recovery from liquid metals

Liquid breeder materials have many advantages over solid breeder materials. The advantages are the ease to bring the breeder material outside the breeder blanket for tritium recovery, a practical immunity to irradiation damage, a high thermal conductivity and a relative ease to meet fabrication and specification requirements. A number of liquid breeder materials have been thus proposed. These are liquid metals, molten salts and aqueous lithium salt solutions. Among these, liquid metals of pure lithium and the eutectic Pb-17Li are receiving the most attention for their potentiality. The present paper is to summarize recent works on the topic of tritium recovery from the two candidate materials of pure lithium and the eutectic Pb-17Li and to discuss the implications of the works for successful future development. The physical and chemical properties of these two materials are also discussed in order to make the similarities and differences clear