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Latest News
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Gilbert Bellanger, Jean Jacques Rameau
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 36 | Number 3 | November 1999 | Pages 296-308
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A110
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In addition to the tritiated water produced by the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, large quantities result from the development of controlled fusion reactors for power generation (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). To obtain a new industrial method of reducing tritiated water, an electrolytic rather than a chemical process was developed. A prototype electrolyzer is described and the results obtained are given. In this process, the tritium recovery system is based on the principle of a gas diffusion Pd-Ag electrode incorporating a tritium charging cathode, which produces very pure hydrogen isotope gases. This is for converting 3H2O to high-purity 3H2 and its isotopes from tritiated water with >30 TBq/cm3 radioactivity (>50% 3H2O). The prototype module has been tested in a hot laboratory. The overall operating time exceeded 1500 h, and 6 g of gaseous tritium were produced without difficulty.