Zeolite membranes and palladium membrane reactor for tritium extraction from the breeder blankets of ITER and DEMO

While the tritium technology for the inner DT fuel cycle of fusion reactors shall be demonstrated in ITER, the tritium management in the breeder blanket remains very challenging. Most of the process options rely on ad(b)sorption/desorption cycles, using dedicated packed beds to handle separately the molecular and oxide forms of tritium. This approach seems satisfactory for ITER, but seems difficult to scale up to DEMO. The alternative use of a catalytic membrane reactor in combination with inorganic membranes would simplify and improve the overall tritium management. Zeolite membranes should enable in a single step the pre-concentration of all tritiated species. This tritium enriched stream could be afterwards processed using PERMCAT (catalytic Pd-based membrane reactor) to finally recover the tritium in its pure molecular form. This paper discusses at the conceptual level such approach. The latest experimental results on zeolite membrane and multi-tube PERMCAT reactor are presented. Next R&D activities for technical scale demonstrations and refined simulation tools are proposed to finally estimate the sizes of the components to be operated in ITER and DEMO.