The Receipt, Storage and Distribution of Tritium in ETHEL

ETHEL, a new research facility located at the JRC-Ispra, is envisaged to be licensed for 37 PBq (1 MCi or 100 g) of tritium. A central service of laboratory operations is the overall control of tritium within the facility. The intended management of tritium has been developed on the basis of ETHEL's general safety criteria and the requirements of typical experiments with regard to quantity, quality and frequency of tritium distributions. The present paper describes the method of supplying tritium to the laboratory, its accountancy and long-term storage, its distribution to individual experiments and, finally, its retrieval from experiments or the laboratory's tritium recovery system.