Near-surface leaching studies of Pb-implanted Savannah River waste glass

The present experiments with Savannah River Plant simulated nuclear waste glass implanted with Pb ions, used Rutherford backscattering spectrometry and elastic recoil detection to follow in detail the changes in composition which occur in the near-surface region upon leaching in deionized water at 900C. Analyses of the leach solutions were made in an attempt to correlate the actual leach rates with the observed near-surface compositional changes. These experiments show that radiation damage can cause changes in the composition of the near-surface of the leached glass. We also find that a critical fluence is reached where abrupt changes of the surface elemental composition occur as a result of leaching. This fluence is near the value observed by both Dran, et al. and Primak. Solution analyses were not made for all the leaching experiments. However, those analyses which were made indicate that the amount of material actually leaving the glass is not significantly increased as a result of the radiation damage