A Review of 25 Years of Corrosion Studies on HLW Container Materials at the CEA
- Department of Physical Chemistry, French Atomic Energy Commission, DPC/SCCME, Bat 458, Centre d'Etudes de Saclay, Gif sur Yvette, 91191 (France)
The Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA, French Atomic Energy Commission) has been involved in researches on nuclear waste management for more than 25 years. One of the key issues is the prediction of the long term behavior and aging of the High Level Waste (HLW) containers in order to develop concepts that will ensure the confinement of the activity over extremely long periods of time. Preliminary studies were carried out on two concepts, one of a thin 'corrosion resistant' container made of titanium or nickel base alloy, and the other on a thick 'corrosion allowance' container made or carbon steel. The results of these experiments showed that the 'corrosion resistant' concept led to a high uncertainty on the development and propagation rate of localized forms of corrosion, and the concept of geological disposal in an argillaceous host formation of thick waste containers made of carbon steel was chosen as the reference for further studies. This eventually led to the voting of a law relative to nuclear waste management on June 28 2006, which endorses the geological disposal of corrosion allowance containers as the reference solution, while stating than an effort must be kept on the research on actinides transmutation to reduce the time during which a geological disposal facility has to be proven capable to ensure the confinement of the radioactive waste. Studies are still in progress to better assess the corrosion mechanisms relevant to this situation in order to provide reliable models for the long term prediction of the containers corrosion behavior. (author)
- Research Organization:
- Materials Research Society, 506 Keystone Drive, Warrendale, PA, 15086-7573 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 21062413
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Symposium on Scientific Basis for Nuclear Waste Management, Boston - Massachusetts (United States), 27 Nov - 1 Dec 2006; Other Information: Country of input: France; 4 refs; Related Information: In: Proceedings of the symposium on Scientific Basis for Nuclear Waste Management XXX, by Dunn, Darrell [ed. Southwest Research Inst., San Antonio, Texas (United States)]; Poinssot, Christophe [ed. CEA-Saclay, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette cedex (France)]; Begg, Bruce [ed. Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Lucas Heights, NSW (Australia)], v. 985, 663 pages.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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