A Uranium Bed with Ceramic Body for Tritium Storage

Tritium permeation through structural materials is a key issue in many activities linked with tritium handling both for radiological safety and accountancy reasons to say nothing of economical aspect: tritium is not the cheapest material in the world. It is widely recognized that ceramic coatings provide an attractive solution to lower tritium permeation in structural materials. Alumina based ceramic coatings have the highest permeation reduction factor for hydrogen. Nevertheless even small cracking will significantly spoil the permeation reduction factor of a protecting coating. Nowadays for hydrogenating neutron tube targets with tritium “VNIIA” uses working chambers manufactured by pressing of alumina based ceramics. These chambers have revealed extremely low hydrogen permeation upon conditions of their application. For this reason an attempt was made to apply low porous ceramics as a structural material of a bed body for tritium storage in a setup used for hydrogenating neutron tube targets at “VNIIA”. The present article introduces the design of the bed. This bed possesses essentially less hydrogen permeation factor than traditionally used beds with stainless steel body. Bed heating in order to recover hydrogen from the bed is suggested to be implemented by high frequency induction means. Inductive heating allows decreasing the time necessary for tritium release from the bed as well as power consumption. Both of these factors mean less thermal power release into glove box where a setup for tritium handling is installed and thus causes fewer problems with pressure regulations inside the glove box. Inductive heating allows raising tritium sorbent material temperature up to melting point. The latter allows achieving nearly full tritium recovery.