Cement: a building block for safer nuclear waste storage
Cement offers some fantastic advantages for nuclear waste immobilisation. Research at Sheffield is investigating the interaction between cement and radioactive elements and how it can be used to immobilise radioactive waste.
Conditioning of radioactive waste arising from nuclear facility operation and decommissioning is essential to its safe disposal and environmental remediation. Cementation offers significant advantages over other waste conditioning routes including simplicity, relatively high throughput, low cost, and the absence of secondary waste generation.
Research at Sheffield
At The University of Sheffield, the Sustainable Materials at Sheffield research team is working to develop next-generation cementation technologies for conditioning and disposal of complex radioactive waste streams. Led by Dr Brant Walkley, the team comprises 14 postdoc and PhD researchers working on a variety of topics to understand the surface chemistry, fluid-particle interactions, and reaction mechanisms that control reaction, setting, and hardening, and physical property development in cements for radioactive waste disposal.
Recent investment in this work at Sheffield includes a new EPSRC project focused on development of novel geopolymer cements for conditioning and safe disposal of radioactive waste from the Sellafield and Fukushima sites, and a new £1M partnership with Sellafield Ltd. to develop limestone calcined clay cement encapsulants as a near-term solution for solidification of radioactive waste at Sellafield.
These partnerships highlight the confidence of UK and international research councils and industry in the University of Sheffield as a centre of research excellence in cement chemistry and engineering.”
Dr Brant Walkley
Senior Lecturer, School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering