Possible Design Modifications of ITER Fuel Cycle

During the ITER design phase, the conceptual design of the fuel processing cycle has been established. The fuel processing cycle is designed to be able to handle all the tritium containing streams of the ITER. These streams include plasma exhaust, blanket tritium recovery, pellet propellent, neutron beam exhaust, water coolant detritiation, waste water from the room air detritiation system. The design is very conservative, i.e., the flow rate of each stream is high and the detritiation factor required is very high. A preliminary optimization study has been carried out to simplify the ITER fuel cycle design. We investigated: 1. The throughput and composition of the input tritium containing streams from various components to the fuelprocessing cycle. 2. The fraction of those streams needed to be detritiated. 3. The required detritiation factors required for each of the streams. The results of the investigation determined that the major input tritium containing streams can be reduced by at least a factor of 10. The required detritiation factor can be reduced from a factor of 100 to 10⁶. The size of the fuel processing cycle, the tritium inventory and the complexity of this system can, therefore, also be reduced.