Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.
Mohammad Sabeti
PhD candidate, Faculty of Science
Evaluation of copper as the corrosion barrier for nuclear waste containers
Copper is a remarkably corrosion-resistant metal and will be used as the corrosion barrier for used nuclear fuel containers. Used fuel containers are a part of the Canadian design for the safe disposal of nuclear waste in a deep geological repository (DGR). In the DGR, salts, humidity, and high temperature will be present and will provide the conditions for corrosion to proceed. I use quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and resistance probe techniques to investigate the corrosion behavior of copper under DGR conditions. A QCM is a kind of balance that uses the change in frequency of a copper-coated quartz crystal to detect mass changes on the nanogram scale. I use a resistance probe to measure the change in electrical resistance of a copper element to detect thickness changes due to corrosion. This research aims to verify the capability of copper to resist corrosion for the specified period (1,000,000 years).
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