Article: Radwastes may escape glass via new route. (radioactive waste research)

Over the next several years, the Department of Energy (DOE) will begin vitrifying -- incorporating within glass -- highly radioactive liquids and sludgy nuclear wastes to prevent them from escaping into the environment. But new research indicates that exposure to the slow dripping of water can change the largely nonreactive borosilicate glass into a form that facilitates the flaking of microscopic mineralized shards. More important, the DOE-funded study shows, some of the water-borne flecks bea unexpectedly enriched concentrations of certain of the interred radionuclides.

This flaking process, or spalling, represents a previously unknown mechanism for directly ...

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