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Publication Laka-library:
Tritium fact sheet (1986)

Author	Nigel Harle
Date	December 1986
Classification	6.01.3.10/58 (NUCLEAR SAFETY - REACTORS - GENERAL)
Front

INTRODUCTION

Tritium is an extremely paradoxical - and dangerous - material. On the one hand, it 
is a key material in thermonuclear weapons, produced in highly concentrated form 
in special military reactors; its market price is between 10 and 11 million dollars per 
kilogram (=approx. 9.7 Mega-curie, or MCi *). At the same time, tritium generated as 
a waste product during civilian and military nuclear operations is released largely 
uncontrolled to the environment, there being no financially viable technology for 
separating it from effluents.
While the nuclear establishment is prepared to admit that some measures are 
necessary to control (i.e. reduce to economically acceptable levels) discharges of 
most solid wastes, e.g. by ion exchange and filtration methods, it has always stated 
that tritium is one of the least hazardous forms of radioactive waste, thus justifying 
massive discharges to the environment: in terms of Curies, tritium discharges are 
exceeded only by those of the radioactive isotopes of krypton and xenon. The truth 
of the matter, though, is that the retrieval of tritium (and certain other 
radionuclides) from waste streams would cripple the nuclear industry financially, 
and consequently the enormous body of scientific evidence disproving the 
establishment's low-toxicity claims is callously waved aside.
Before summarizing this evidence, it is instructive to provide a physical description 
of tritium, together with a short overview of the general nature and extent of tritium 
pollution.

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