Alteration of archeological and natural analogs for radioactive waste glass under different environmental conditions

Abstract

Approximately 200,000 m3 of legacy radioactive waste from plutonium production stored at U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford site will be immobilized in glass for disposal. The glass must limit radionuclide release into the environment for thousands of years, which is challenging to assess in laboratory experiments. Long-term alteration signatures on analog glasses can approximate how radioactive waste glass will perform over extended periods. Different glasses buried for tens to thousands of years at sites subject to variable climates and environments were selected for analysis. Surface altered layers that formed during glass corrosion were characterized. The thickness, chemistry, and morphology of surficial layers are discussed in terms of glass chemistry and burial conditions. Glass from arid environments, e.g., Timna (Israel), exhibited thinner surface layers (~2 µm) compared to glasses altered in humid conditions, e.g., Dobkowice (Poland: up to 59 µm), suggesting a role of burial environment and climate in long-term durability.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Marcial, J. Chesnutt, J. Neeway, J.J. Gichon, E. Thorpe, C.L. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2860-8611 Zhu, Z. Golovchak, R. Cebulski, J. Niedzielski, P. Szostek, M. Luksic, S. Choi, S. Kennedy, A. Anguish, R. Bohrmann, N.C. Denny, A. Yagel, O. McCloy, J.S. Brown, L.R. Hand, R.J. Hager, J.R. Plymale, A.A. Pearce, C.I. Ben-Yosef, E. Hellmann, R. Sjöblom, R. Schweiger, M.J. Kosson, D.S. Kruger, A.A.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/.
Keywords:	Nuclear waste; Pollution remediation
Dates:	Submitted: 1 January 2025 Accepted: 3 June 2025 Published (online): 5 August 2025 Published: 5 August 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	12 Aug 2025 09:19
Last Modified:	12 Aug 2025 09:19
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41529-025-00624-4
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:230276

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Alteration of archeological and natural analogs for radioactive waste glass under different environmental conditions

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