Operation of the room air tritium removal system at the Tritium Systems Test Assembly

Fusion reactor facilities will be required to minimize releases of hazardous materials to the environment during both normal operations and accident situations. The Tritium Systems Test Assembly (TSTA) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory has a tritium removal system, capable of processing room air to collect tritium accidentally released into the tritium handling areas of the facility. This system, the Emergency Tritium Cleanup (ETC) system, will both minimize accidental releases to the environment from TSTA and demonstrate the feasibility and operations of a large room air detritiation system. The system is also designed to study tritium releases under controlled conditions. Based on the initial nontritium tests described in this paper, we have determined that the ETC has a single-pass efficiency for tritium collection of greater than 99.9%.