The tritium systems test assembly at Los Alamos National Laboratory

AbstractThe Tritium Systems Test Assembly (TSTA) at Los Alamos National Laboratory is a facility for the integrated testing, in full scale, of the processes and safety systems required for the reprocessing and recycling of plasma exhaust gas from a tokamak reactor. The facility can reprocess and reuse tritium at the rate of 1000 g per day, with a tritium inventory of 130 g. TSTA has been operated since 1984 with increasing amounts of tritium and an increasing degree of system integration without significant releases to the environment or doses to workers. Full loop integration was achieved in 1988. Since 1987, the TSTA has been jointly funded and jointly operated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. Objectives include: the demonstration of long-term reliability and safety, the qualification of equipment for tritium service, and the verification of a facility that can be copied for future fusion machines, such as the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER). Future plans include the installation and integrated testing of a new impurity removal system of Japanese design, testing the effect on the plasma exhaust gas reprocessing systems of off-normal conditions in the torus, and the development and testing of technology for processing tritium contained in a breeding blanket product stream.