nuclear waste – Lightsources.org

Shipwreck glass reveals insights into waste-form durability

2026/08/252026/08/29

Historic glass artefacts, especially those submerged in marine environments for centuries, serve as natural testbeds for long-term material stability. Understanding how glasses corrode over decades or centuries is critical for a wide range of applications, from cultural heritage conservation to the safe immobilisation of nuclear waste.

Until now, lab-based accelerated corrosion tests have been used as proxies – but how well do they mirror real-world behaviour? Researchers from the University of Sheffield and their marine archaeology and materials science collaborators tackled this question in their paper, published in Applied Geochemistry. The team analysed ancient lead-silicate glass ingots recovered from the 18th century shipwreck of the HMS Albion and compared them with laboratory-weathered analogues. Using micro-X-ray absorption spectroscopy at Diamond’s I18 beamline, they probed element redistribution and corrosion layer development.

When glass is immersed in saline, i.e. oxygenated seawater for extended periods, its surface layers evolve through ion leaching, new phase formation (such as clays or zeolites) and structural collapse – all of which affect long-term durability. Accelerated lab tests simulate this but often differ in time scale, solution chemistry or mechanical stress, which raises the question: Do accelerated tests capture the full complexity of real glass corrosion?

In this study, the team analysed shipwreck-altered lead-silicate glass (with visible corrosion layers up to several hundred microns thick) and compared the leached layers, element migrations (e.g., Pb, Si, Ca) and secondary mineral formation with artificially corroded analogues in lab immersion tests.

At Diamond’s I18 beamline, the team used micro-focused XAS and XRF to map elemental speciation and spatial distribution across corrosion layers.

Read more on the Diamond website

A new stable form of plutonium discovered

2019/10/182019/12/17

An international team of scientists, led by the Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), have found a new compound of plutonium with an unexpected, pentavalent oxidation state.

This new phase of plutonium is solid and stable, and may be a transient phase in radioactive waste repositories. The results are published this week in Angewandte Chemie as a Very Important Paper (VIP). Countries across the globe are making efforts to improve the safety of the nuclear waste storage in order to prevent release of radioactive nuclides to the environment. Plutonium, has been shown to be transported by groundwaters from contaminated sites for kilometres in the form of colloids, which are formed by interaction with clay, iron oxides or natural organic matter.
A team of scientists lead by HZDR studies the chemistry of actinides under environmentally relevant conditions, by synthesizing such compounds, and then studying their electronic and structural behaviour both with advanced synchrotron X-ray methods experimentally as well as theoretically. The latest paper of the international team shows how an experiment seemingly gone wrong leads to a breakthrough: the discovery of a new stable form of plutonium.
It all started when Kristina Kvashnina, physicist from HZDR and based at the ROBL beamline at the ESRF, and her team were trying to create plutonium dioxide nanoparticles using different precursors to be studied at ROBL. When they used the Pu (VI) precursor, they realized that a strange reaction took place during the formation of the plutonium dioxide nanoparticles. “Every time we create nanoparticles from the other precursors Pu(III), (IV) or (V) the reaction is very quick, but here we observed a weird phenomenon half way”, explains Kvashnina. She figured that it must be Pu (V), pentavalent plutonium, a never-observed-before form of the element, after doing a high-energy resolution fluorescence detection (HERFD) experiment at the Pu L3 edge at ROBL.

Image: The team in front of the spectrometer of ROBL. Kristina Kvashnina is the second from the right.

Keeping nuclear power safe

2019/04/102019/04/10

Nuclear energy is clean, powerful, affordable, and zero-emission. A new study uses the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to help ensure that waste from nuclear power plants remains safe and secure for thousands of years to come.
The project, led by Dan Kaplan and Dien Li, researchers at the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, looks at storing iodine, which is generated during uranium use, including in nuclear power generation.
Among the challenges of iodine management is its slow rate of decay—it has a half-life of 16 million years. Iodine is volatile and highly mobile in the environment, making containment critically important in nuclear waste management.
Currently, nuclear waste disposal sites use Ag-zeolite to sequester iodine from nuclear waste streams, which is then encased in concrete to prevent leaching.

Image: Samples of different formulations of cement that were tested for their ability to immobilize radioiodine.

The power of Metal-Organic Frameworks

2018/02/052018/02/14

Trapping nuclear waste at the molecular level

Nuclear power currently supplies just over 10% of the world’s electricity. However one factor hindering its wider implementation is the confinement of dangerous substances produced during the nuclear waste disposal process. One such bi-product of the disposal process is airborne radioactive iodine that, if ingested, poses a significant health risk to humans. The need for a high capacity, stable iodine store that has a minimised system volume is apparent – and this collaborative research project may have found a solution.

Researchers have successfully used ultra-stable MOFs to confine large amounts of iodine to an exceptionally dense area. A number of complementary experimental techniques, including measurements taken at Diamond Light Source and ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, were coupled with theoretical modelling to understand the interaction of iodine within the MOF pores at the molecular level.

High resolution x-ray powder diffraction (PXRD) data were collected at Diamond’s I11 beamline. The stability and evolution of the MOF pore was monitored as the iodine was loaded into the structure. Comparison of the loaded and empty samples revealed the framework not only adsorbed but retained the iodine within its structure.

Illustration: Airborne radioactive iodine is one of the bi-products of the nuclear waste disposal process. A recent study involving Diamond Light Source and ISIS Neutron and Muon Source showed how MOFs can capture and store iodine which may have implications for the future confinement of these hazardous substances.

Long duration experiments reach 1,000th day

2017/07/032017/10/09

… it was on Diamond’s Long Duration Experimental (LDE) facility, on beamline I11

The experiment, led by Dr Claire Corkhill from the University of Sheffield, has used the world-leading capabilities of the beamline to investigate the hydration of cements used by the nuclear industry for the storage and disposal of waste.

“Understanding the rate at which hydration occurs in cement, a process that can take anywhere up to 50 years, is very important to help us predict the behaviours of cement in the long term,” explained Dr Corkhill.

“These cements are being used to safely lock away the radioactive elements in nuclear waste for timescales of more than 10,000 years, so it is extremely important that we can accurately predict the properties of these materials in the future. The unique facility at Diamond has allowed us to follow this reaction in situ, for 1000 days, and the data is already allowing us to identify particular phases that will safely lock away radioactive elements in 100 years’ time, something we would otherwise not have been able to determine.”

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