The current status of glass leaching studies in France

Glass has been selected in France as the material used to confine the activity of fission product solutions, and a continuous vitrification process has been developed at the Marcoule Vitrification Facility (AVM), the first industrial plant. Borosilicate glass was chosen in various compositions for its properties: it is a homogeneous, non-porous material that incorporates appreciable quantities of most of the fission product oxides, and is only alterable at the surface interface layer. Glass thus constitutes the primary radioactivity containment barrier, and it is essential to determine its long-term behavior. Water constitutes the principal hazard during temporary or definitive storage of the glass blocks. Two types of inherent material properties are studied from the standpoint of glass stability under leaching conditions: - chemical durability; - radioactive containability with regard to the various radionuclides, fission products and especially the actinides. Durability tests are carried out in SOXHLET devices and the alteration rates are measured by the weight loss. The containability is measured by the leach rate, i.e. by the rate of activity loss into the water. Leaching tests are conducted for several major objectives: - selection of glass compositions (leach rates); - leaching mechanism studies (hydrolyzed layer characteristics, effects of temperature, pressure, pH, etc.); - long-term behavior studies (glass specimens doped with alpha-emitters); - simulation of geological repository environments