Development of compact electrolytic enrichment system for environmental tritium analysis.

The article focuses on the development and evaluation of a new electrolytic enrichment system with a compact glass cell designed for tritium analysis in small-volume water samples, such as tritiated water (HTO) recovered from air. This system uses three nickel-iron-nickel (Ni–Fe–Ni) electrodes arranged at the bottom of the cell to maintain constant electrolysis conditions and enables effective tritium enrichment with factors up to 43 through manual refilling over extended periods. The enriched samples, measured by liquid scintillation counting (LSC), achieve lower detection limits (down to 0.02 Bq per L) compared to direct measurement methods, improving accuracy for low-level environmental tritium detection. Validation through the International Atomic Energy Agency’s TRIC2022 interlaboratory comparison confirmed the system’s analytical reliability for low-level tritium samples.