Performance Test of the Tritium Storage Vessel

A WTRF(wolsong tritium removal facility) is under construction at the Wolsong Nuclear Generating Station to recover the tritium from the heavy water. This facility is expected to produce a high purity tritium, greater than 99.0% isotopically pure. The recovered tritium must be packaged safely for long-term storage. Packaging tritium as a solid metal tritide is preferred over gaseous tritium due to the concern for the leakage. Titanium sponge has been selected as suitable material for tritium product immobilization. In this study, prototype tritium storage vessel has been designed and fabricated for the WTRF. The vessel contains 850 g of titanium sponge in volume. The hydrogen gas (equivalent to 50 kCi of tritium) is reacted with titanium sponge in a batch. The final hydrogen content (H/Ti) of the titanium sponge was 1.0 after ten batch reactions and this amount of hydrogen is equivalent to 500 kCi of tritium. Therefore, it was shown that the prototype tritium storage vessel can be used sufficiently for the WTRF.