Cold trapping of traces of tritiated water from the helium loops of a fusion breeder blanket

The ITER Helium Cooled Pebble Bed (HCPB) Test Blanket Module (TBM) will comprise three helium loops designed for: tritium extraction from the breeder zone, heat removal, and purification of the coolant. The process step envisaged for tritium extraction as well as for coolant purification includes a cryogenic cold trap as main component for the removal of tritiated water vapour (mainly HTO, H2O). The concentrations of water in the gas streams are expected to be extremely small, i.e. of the order of 10 ppm by volume. In this paper, we describe first runs with a cold trap using helium as the carrier gas at flow rates of 0.1 and 1.0 m3/h. The range of water vapour concentration in the helium carrier gas was 0.5 to >200 ppmv. The experiments have demonstrated the ability of the cold trap to remove water vapour efficiently from the He stream down to concentrations of less than 0.02 ppmv when the inlet water concentration is in the range of 300–650 ppmv or higher.