Deuterium is a crucial clean energy source required for nuclear fusion and is a future resource needed in various industries and scientific fields. However, it is not easy to enrich deuterium because the proportion of deuterium in the hydrogen mixture is scarce, at approximately 0.016%. Furthermore, the physical and chemical properties of the hydrogen mixture and deuterium are very similar. Therefore, the efficient separation of deuterium from hydrogen mixtures is often a significant challenge when using modern separation technologies. Recently, to effectively separate deuterium, studies utilizing the ‘Kinetic Quantum Sieving Effect (KQS)’ of porous materials are increasing. Therefore, in this review, two different strategies have been discussed for improving KQS efficiency for hydrogen isotope separation performance using nanoporous materials. One is the gating effect, which precisely controls the aperture locally by adjusting the temperature and pressure. The second is the breathing phenomenon, utilizing the volume change of the structure from closed system to open system. It has been reported that efficient hydrogen isotope separation is possible using these two methods, and each of these effects is described in detail in this review. In addition, a specific-isotope responsive system (e.g., 2nd breathing effect in MIL-53) has recently been discovered and is described here as well.

Hydrogen isotopes (i.e. deuterium and tritium) are supplied to the tokamak in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) fuel cycle. One important part of the ITER fuel cycle is the recycling of unused fuel back to the tokamak, as almost 99 % of fuel is unburned during fusion reaction. For this, cryogenic distillation has been used in the isotope separation system (ISS) of ITER, but this technique tends to be energy-intensive and to have low selectivity (typically below 1.5 at 24 K). Recently, efficient isotope separation by porous materials has been reported in the so-called quantum sieving process. Hence, in this study, hydrogen isotope adsorption behavior is studied using chemically stable ZIF-11. At low temperature (40 K ~ 70 K), the adsorption increases and the sorption hysteresis becomes stronger as the temperature increases to 70K. Molar ratio of deuterium to hydrogen based on the isotherms shows the highest (max. 14) ratio at 50 K, confirming the possibility of use as a potential isotope separation material.