Archive | 2021
Changes of Activity Concentration of Tritium in Water under the Air with Tritiated Water Vapor
Abstract
Recently, controversy continues over the cause of occurrence of tritiated water, whose activity concentration was about 7.1 × 10 Bq · m, found in a nuclear power plant in Korea. The power plant claims that the tritiated water may have been produced by the absorption of the tritiated water vapor from the air, while some suspect that it may have leaked out from the other systems [1]. We cannot hastily determine the exact cause but we have investigated the possibility that water containing initially no tritium could be changed to tritiated water with high activity concentration of tritium when it is placed in the air containing tritiated water vapor. It has been well known since the 1960s that tritium in the air containing tritiated vapor (HTO, T is tritium or H) is easily transferred in water. This phenomenon has been used early for sampling of tritium in the air (known as air bubbler) [2–4] and still used today. It is also applied to respiratory masks for removing tritiated water vapor these days [5–7]. The relationship between the molar concentrations of tritium and hydrogen in the tritiated vapor of the air and those in (liquid phase) water at equilibrium is expressed by Equation (1), reported by Sepall and Mason [8], as follows: