Safe handling experience of a tritium storage bed

Hayashi, Takumi; Suzuki, Takumi; Yamada, Masayuki; Shu, Wataru; Yamanishi, Toshihiko

In ITER facility, about 3 kg of tritium will be stored in more than 30 ZrCo hydride beds, as a reference design. The safe design and operation of tritium storage beds will be one of the most important points to enhance total safety of the facility. In the Tritium Process Lab. in Japan Atomic Energy Agency, many tritium storage beds with ZrCo have been used with/without self-accountancy measure, and the safe handling experiences have been accumulated for almost 20 years. From these experiences, the key issues to be considered for the safety design are the effect of tritium decay, such as decay heat transfer and He behavior with the normal protection of over temperature, over pressure and leak for a metal-hydride bed. Concerning the safety operation, the key issues are the procedure of hydrogenation-dehydrogenation cycle under the requirements of the storage system and the emergency performances, such as a rapid hydrogen recovery and loss of normal cooling function.