tritium handling is the discipline of containment, accounting, and processing systems that manage tritium safely through a fusion plant's fuel cycle, from delivery and storage through injection, exhaust, and recovery.
Handling is the near-neighbor of 📝tritium inventory and the two divide cleanly: inventory is how much 📝tritium a facility holds, handling is everything the facility does to hold it. What makes the job hard is chemistry, not radiation intensity — tritium's beta decay is too weak to penetrate skin, but the isotope behaves exactly like hydrogen: it permeates hot metals, exchanges readily into water as tritiated water (which is far more biologically available than the gas), and diffuses through seals that would stop any other radioactive material. Handling systems answer with defense in depth: multiple nested confinement barriers, gloveboxes and room air detritiation systems that catch and recover what escapes the first wall of containment, permeation barriers on hot pipework, and gram-level accountancy that satisfies regulators tracking every curie on site.
Decades of practice stand behind the discipline. Fission reactors, tritium-producing national laboratories, and the D-T campaigns at TFTR and JET all built and ran tritium plants, and ITER's fuel-cycle facility will be the largest yet. For commercial 📝fusion, handling scales from laboratory practice to industrial routine — a licensing and operations question as much as a physics one.