Experimental Study on Lithium Leakage Behavior

<jats:p>In the Japanese engineering validation activities on the target facility of the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility, two studies on the advanced lithium leak detection system and the fire-extinguishing behavior of lithium were performed.</jats:p> <jats:p>In the former study, the fluorescence was distinguishable from the background using the difference of decay curves from the results of the lithium fluorescence measurement under two lithium concentration (256 ng/L and 4.58 ng/L) in argon. This result shows the basic applicability of the laser based lithium measuring technique as the lithium detector could be confirmed.</jats:p> <jats:p>In the latter study, fire-extinguishing behavior of two kinds of carbon base fire extionguishishants — MITEX and GRAPHEX — to lithium was examined. The both extinguishants showed excellent fire-extinguishing performance, and there were equivalent to that of Natlex-L obtained in the previous study. Since the bulk densities of the both carbon based extinguishants were about equal to the density of lithium, the subsidence of the fire-extinguishings which was observed in the Natlex-L was not observed. In fact, it was considered that no dependency of lithium pool depth on the required thickness of the fire extinguishants was observed for the carbon based extinguishants.</jats:p>