New materials help clean-up Chernobyl and Fukushima
29 Jan 2020
Materials which could be used to help clean-up the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power stations have been developed by a team from the UK.
The materials, produced by Dr Claire Corkhill and her team from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, in collaboration with scientists in Ukraine, can simulate the mixture of highly radioactive molten nuclear fuel and building materials that fuse together during a nuclear meltdown.
These Lava-like Fuel Containing Materials (LFCMs) obstruct decommissioning efforts at the nuclear disaster sites. Published in the journal Nature Materials Degradation, the development is the first time a close approximation of a real LFCM has ever been achieved.
Dr Corkhill said: “Understanding the mechanical, thermal and chemical properties of the materials created in a nuclear meltdown is critical to help retrieve them, for example, if we don’t know how hard they are, how can we create the radiation-resistant robots required to cut them out?”
During the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents, radioactive materials mixed with fuel cladding and other building materials in the reactors and are now incredibly difficult and dangerous to remove from the sites. If left untreated, the LFCMs pose an ongoing radiological safety risk to the local environment.
In the case of Chernobyl, the mixture of molten fuel, cladding, steel, concrete and sand formed nearly 100 tonnes of highly radioactive glass-like lava, which flowed through the nuclear power plant and has solidified into large masses. The masses present a highly dangerous risk to personnel and the environment in the surrounding area and could remain a hazard for decades, even millennia, unless something can be done to stabilise or remove them. However, very few samples of these meltdown materials are available to study and the masses are often too hazardous for people or even robots to get close to in order to better understand the behaviour of the materials.
The simulated materials created by Dr Corkhill have been used to analyse the thermal characteristics and corrosion kinetics of LFCMs, which produced results that are very close to those of real LFCM samples reported by previous studies.
