Tritium behavior on the water-metal boundary for the permeation into cooling water through metal piping

Hayashi, Takumi; Nakamura, Hirofumi; Isobe, Kanetsugu; Kobayashi, Kazuhiro; Yamanishi, Toshihiko; Okuno, Kenji*

How to confine tritium within high temperature breeding blanket is the key issue for safety and fuel economy of the fusion reactor. Specially, tritium permeation into cooling water is very important, however, there is little report of the systematic experiment comparing with that into gaseous coolant. Therefore, a series of tritium transportation experiments into water was performed through pure iron piping samples, which contained more than 1 kPa of pure tritium gas and fixed inside the water jacket under controlled temperature and pressure. Chemical species of tritium in water were measured during the experiment until reaching enough stable permeation, and tritium distribution/situation on the metal surface layer was also measured using autoradiography etc. after the experiment. In this paper, the results of tritium transportation experiments were summarized and tritium behavior on the boundary surface between metal piping and cooling water was discussed.