Measurement of tritium concentration in heavy water by azeotropic distillation

In this work, the concentration of tritium in D2O of various degrees of purity was mea sured. Samples were taken from the Arak heavy water plant and tritium concentrations were determined using a liquid scintillation detector (LSC) based on tritium decay. In the present work, instead of simple distillation, is used the azeotropic distillation method. Absorption and fluorescence spectra were recorded using a Shimadzu UV-2100 spectrometer and an LS50B fluorescence spectrometer. The tritium concentration in the samples varied from 1.75 ± 0.80 to 6.16 ± 1.01 Bq.L−1 in D2O enrichment from 0.35% to 77.50%. The correlation coefficient between tritium concentration and D2O purity in heavy water was obtained as R² = 0.853. Deviation for 99.8% D2O enriched in heavy water. This was observed from a straight line, leading to a drop in R² . The results of this measurement showed that the tritium concentration did not exceed the value set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).