Hydrogen isotope behavior transferring through water metal boundary

Hayashi, Takumi; Nakamura, Hirofumi; Isobe, Kanetsugu; Kobayashi, Kazuhiro; Oyaizu, Makoto; Oya, Yasuhisa*; Okuno, Kenji*; Yamanishi, Toshihiko

Tritium confinement is the most important safety issue in the fusion reactor. Specially, tritium behavior transferring through water metal boundary is very important to design tritium plant with breading blanket system using cooling water. A series of tritium permeation experiment into pressurized water jacket with He or jacket purging less than 1000 ppm of water vapor in Ar has been performed through pure iron piping, which contained about 1 kPa of pure tritium gas at 423 K, with monitoring the chemical forms of tritium permeated into water or water vapor jackets. The effect of metal surface condition was also investigated, such as oxidation to magnetite or gold plating on pure iron. The results clearly show that chemical species of permeated tritium depends on the oxygen population on the metal boundary. In case of pure iron, several hundreds ppm of HO is enough to transfer tritium as HTO from the boundary surface to outer jacket. When oxygen population on the boundary surface decreases by gold plating, HT fraction increases drastically. On the other hand, it is also found the possibility of hydrogen generation effect on the metal boundary, such as Schikorr reaction. In order to discuss more detail mechanism, actual hydrogen transfer behavior from water to metal was investigated as a function of temperature.