Quality and Purity Specifications
Usable tritium must meet isotopic-purity and contaminant limits; specification, not just quantity, determines whether a product can serve its intended use.
Quantity is necessary, not sufficient
A kilogram of impure tritium is not a kilogram of usable product. Isotopic purity (the tritium fraction versus ordinary hydrogen and deuterium), chemical form, and contaminant limits all define whether material meets a given specification. Quality assurance runs alongside production, not after it.
What gets specified
- Isotopic purity: tritium fraction relative to other hydrogen isotopes.
- Chemical form and moisture: affect handling and downstream use.
- Contaminant limits: trace species that must stay below thresholds.
- Decay-corrected quantity: measured against the known decay curve.
Because tritium decays into helium-3, a purity specification implicitly includes managing accumulated helium-3, which is periodically removed. The same separation systems that reach isotopic purity are what make that removal — and the recovery of helium-3 as a product — practical.
Purity and helium-3 removal
Maintaining an isotopic-purity specification for stored tritium is inseparable from managing the helium-3 that decay continuously produces. Left in place, accumulated helium-3 both dilutes the tritium and degrades storage performance, so periodic removal is part of holding material to grade. The same separation systems that reach the required tritium fraction perform this removal and, in doing so, recover the helium-3 as a product. Quality control for one isotope thus directly enables co-production of the other, which is a recurring theme of the breeder platform. Holding tritium to grade and recovering helium-3 are, in practice, two results of the same well-run separation and storage discipline.
For the breeder, purity and contaminant limits are stated as engineering targets aligned to established practice. Demonstrated as-delivered purity is a FOAK-era result, reported honestly rather than assumed.