A Laker TRF AWD tritium removal facility can either be designed for pure volume reduction for long-term storage and decay or a small Cryogenic Distillation or Thermal Diffusion back-end (as shown below) can be added for T2 immobilization.

AWD front-end is decoupled from small back-end processes to produce immobilized 99% T2 product and stable isotope products 3He and H218O (>90%).

Final tritium enrichment uses the non-cryogenic Thermal Diffusion (TD) process, which was successfully used at SRNL for 40 years tritium purification. Laker TRF staff designed the Pharmaron TD system in Cardiff, UK that is successfully enriching Carbon-14.

For 100 kg/h at 10 Ci/kg, T2 production rate is 2.2 std L/h = 38 sccm, a small flow suitable for TD column final enrichment.

At the heart of Laker TRF’s AWD technology lies its proprietary super-hydrophilic glass coated activated stainless-steel packing. The video below shows non-activated packing on the left and activated on the right.