A Permcat reactor for impurity processing in the JET Active Gas Handling System

The Active Gas Handling System (AGHS) of JET is continuously operated to provide torus fuelling and recycling of tritium. As part of a current modification of the Impurity Processing module within the AGHS a Permcat reactor developed at the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe will be installed to minimize the amount of tritium discharged to the Exhaust Detritiation System or to the stack. The Permcatʹs reactor was designed for final clean-up of gases containing up to ∼1% of tritium in different chemical forms such as water, methane or molecular hydrogen. The unit is based on counter current isotopic swamping with protium, and experiments with laboratory scale Permcatʹs have shown decontamination factors in the range of 104–106 under a variety of conditions. For JET a prototype technical unit was designed to cope with a tritiated gas flow rate of at least 1.5 mol/h.