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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 29 2020, @08:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-good-news dept.

Current model for storing nuclear waste is incomplete: Study finds the materials -- glass, ceramics and stainless steel -- interact to accelerate corrosion:

The materials the United States and other countries plan to use to store high-level nuclear waste will likely degrade faster than anyone previously knew because of the way those materials interact, new research shows.

The findings, published today in the journal Nature Materials, show that corrosion of nuclear waste storage materials accelerates because of changes in the chemistry of the nuclear waste solution, and because of the way the materials interact with one another.

“This indicates that the current models may not be sufficient to keep this waste safely stored,” said Xiaolei Guo, lead author of the study and deputy director of Ohio State’s Center for Performance and Design of Nuclear Waste Forms and Containers, part of the university’s College of Engineering. “And it shows that we need to develop a new model for storing nuclear waste.”

The team’s research focused on storage materials for high-level nuclear waste — primarily defense waste, the legacy of past nuclear arms production. The waste is highly radioactive. While some types of the waste have half-lives of about 30 years, others — for example, plutonium — have a half-life that can be tens of thousands of years. The half-life of a radioactive element is the time needed for half of the material to decay.

The United States currently has no disposal site for that waste; according to the U.S. General Accountability Office, it is typically stored near the plants where it is produced. A permanent site has been proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada, though plans have stalled. Countries around the world have debated the best way to deal with nuclear waste; only one, Finland, has started construction on a long-term repository for high-level nuclear waste.

But the long-term plan for high-level defense waste disposal and storage around the globe is largely the same. It involves mixing the nuclear waste with other materials to form glass or ceramics, and then encasing those pieces of glass or ceramics -- now radioactive -- inside metallic canisters. The canisters then would be buried deep underground in a repository to isolate it.

In this study, the researchers found that when exposed to an aqueous environment, glass and ceramics interact with stainless steel to accelerate corrosion, especially of the glass and ceramic materials holding nuclear waste.

The study qualitatively measured the difference between accelerated corrosion and natural corrosion of the storage materials. Guo called it "severe."

Journal Reference:

Xiaolei Guo, Stephane Gin, Penghui Lei, Tiankai Yao, Hongshen Liu, Daniel K. Schreiber, Dien Ngo, Gopal Viswanathan, Tianshu Li, Seong H. Kim, John D. Vienna, Joseph V. Ryan, Jincheng Du, Jie Lian, Gerald S. Frankel. Self-accelerated corrosion of nuclear waste forms at material interfaces. Nature Materials, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41563-019-0579-x


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  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday January 30 2020, @12:11AM (2 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday January 30 2020, @12:11AM (#950915) Journal
    Yucca mountain isn't part of a mountain chain - it's a semi-extinct volcano. A storage facility near a fault line is kind of dumb.
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 30 2020, @01:26AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday January 30 2020, @01:26AM (#950940) Homepage
    One on a subduction zone is kinda perfect, if you think about it.
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:21AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:21AM (#951044) Journal
    Actually, it is. All the mountain chains in the area are basin and range [wikipedia.org] like dominoes that have toppled over. And the volcanism stopped 80k years ago. That makes it good enough for the period of time the site needs to remain undisturbed (I think it's utterly retarded to have a one million year standard for disruption of the site as a US court has advocated).

    Finally, so what if there is a fault line nearby (basin and range traditionally generate such faults due to the sliding of the blocks that make up the structure)? Just don't have it running through the site and you're good.