Tritium Monitoring and Detection
Continuous monitors on air, water, and stack streams catch any tritium migration before it can accumulate or escape.
Because tritium is invisible, odorless, and mobile, the safety system's eyes are its monitors. Kronos instruments the fuel cycle, the room air, the effluent stacks, and the water systems so that any migration is detected quickly, quantified, and acted on — long before it could reach regulatory limits or personnel exposure thresholds.
What is monitored
- Room air: ionization-chamber monitors in tritium-handling areas.
- Stack effluent: continuous sampling of what leaves the building.
- Process streams: in-line monitoring of the fuel cycle and detritiation systems.
- Water systems: sampling for tritiated water (HTO) uptake.
- Personnel: bioassay to detect and quantify any intake.
Monitoring is layered with the physical barriers: a breach in secondary containment shows up as an air-monitor rise while the building confinement still holds, giving time to isolate the source and route air through detritiation. The design distinguishes the chemical form of tritium (gas vs HTO) because HTO is the more dose-relevant species.
From data to action
Alarms are tied to automatic responses — isolation valves, ventilation realignment, detritiation startup — so that detection produces containment without waiting on human decision. Records feed the ALARA program and effluent reporting. See permeation control for how migration is minimized upstream of the monitors.
The principle is simple: measure everywhere tritium could go, and make detection trigger capture automatically.