Tritium Impact and Transfer in Advanced Nuclear reactorS

The TITANS (Tritium Impact and Transfer in Advanced Nuclear reactorS) multidisciplinary project is built to contribute to Research and Innovation to “improve knowledge on tritium management in fission/fusion facilities” and provide ”robust science to EU safety regulators, radiation protection authorities and decision makers”.

TITANS will answer the main challenges of the call: i) Tritium permeation description and associated modeling, ii) tritium measurement, iii) mitigation of tritium release, iv) gain expertise on dismantling activities, v) improve knowledge in radiotoxicity and radiobiology, both combined to dosimetry specific to each biological model studied.

The TITANS work program is established from the results obtained in the former EU TRANSAT project and thanks to scientific discussion within TRANSAT SAC, TITANS members and external experts from EU/broader countries.

TITANS will improve modelling tools to assess tritium inventory/migration in nuclear fission/fusion reactors in order to identify where the new barrier concept developed within TITANS are needed to limit the spread of tritium.

The tritium release during dismantling of tritium-contaminated setup will be evaluated with the help of innovative tritium inventory measurement techniques developed within TITANS. Finally, to ensure tritium circular economy, a mobile device for tritiated water processing will be developed.

At last, human and environmental toxicity impacts after an accidental release of tritiated particles will be assessed through studies on i) the behaviour of aerosols in the environment, ii) biological effects on a mussels population, iii) biokinetics by the skin route and iiii) genotoxic effects on human lung macrophages.

In order to estimate a dose-response relationship, a dosimetric study specific to each organism or cell type will be carried out.

This 3-years project with a 3 M€ allocated budget gathers 21 partners from European countries and UK all involved in tritium activities