Tritium Room Air Monitor Operating Experience Review

Monitoring the breathing air in tritium facility rooms for airborne tritium is a radiological safety requirement and a best practice for personnel safety. Besides audible alarms for room evacuation, these monitors often send signals for process shutdown, ventilation isolation, and cleanup system actuation to mitigate releases and prevent tritium spread to the environment. Therefore, these monitors are important not only to personnel safety but also to public safety and environmental protection. This paper presents an operating experience review of tritium monitor performance on demand during small (1 mCi to 1 Ci) operational releases, and intentional airborne in-room tritium release tests. The tritium tests provide monitor operation data to allow calculation of a statistical estimate for the reliability of monitors annunciating in actual tritium gas airborne release situations. The data show a failure to operate rate of 3.5E-06/monitor-hr with an upper bound of 4.7E-06, a failure to alarm on demand rate of 1.4E-02/demand with an upper bound of 4.4E-02, and a spurious alarm rate of 0.1 to 0.2/monitor-yr.