The containers the U.S. plans to use for nuclear waste storage may corrode
Containers that the U.S. government plans to use to store dangerous nuclear waste underground may be more vulnerable to water damage than previously thought. Millions of liters of highly radioactive waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons program are currently held in temporary storage units across the country. The government’s game plan for permanently disposing of this material is to mix radioactive waste into glass or ceramic, seal it in stainless steel canisters and bury it deep underground. Such a nuclear waste dump may be constructed under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but local opposition has stalled the project (SN: 1/16/02). Now, new lab experiments reveal another potential snafu in the scheme. When a nuclear waste package is exposed to groundwater, chemical interactions between a stainless steel canister and its glass or ceramic contents may cause the materials to corrode slightly faster than expected, researchers report online January 27 in Nature Materials. That corrosion risks exposing the radioactive waste stored in the container. Xiaolei Guo, a...