COMMISSIONING OF THE CATALYTIC PLASMA EXHAUST CLEANUP FACILITY CAPRICE AND FIRST EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

A fuel clean-up process for all plasma exhaust gases from DT fusion ma chines, based on catalytic conversion reactions combined with permeati on of hydrogen isotopes through palladium/silver, has been developed. The complete process has already been proven with relevant concentrati ons of tritium at laboratory scale. On the basis of the results obtain ed the technical facility 'CAPRICE' was designed, and is now under tri tium operation at the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK). The facility is being used to demonstrate the process on a target throughput of 10 mol/h DT and 1 mol/h tritiated and non-tritiated impurities. Full sca le experiments with hydrogen and deuterium have been completed to veri fy the design parameters of the facility and to gain detailed knowledg e on the performance of the different subsystems under a variety of ex perimental conditions. Decontamination factors were obtained from thes e experiments as well as from first tritium runs employing about 350 C i (0.5 %) tritium in deuterium.