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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/R004870/1
Title: Modelling of glasses as nuclear waste forms
Principal Investigator: Trachenko, Professor K
Other Investigators:
Dove, Professor MT
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Physics
Organisation: Queen Mary University of London
Scheme: Standard Research - NR1
Starts: 04 December 2017 Ends: 03 December 2020 Value (£): 367,991
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Energy - Nuclear
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Energy
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Panel DatePanel NameOutcome
29 Jun 2017 Nuclear Energy Universities Programme (NEUP) EPSRC/US Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
This proposal addresses the pressing need to find suitable methods to safely encapsulate nuclear waste. This is required in order to make the nuclear industry sustainable and is also necessary for the environmental reasons due to large amount of legacy waste already accumulated. We model new types of glasses as encapsulation matrices and perform state-of-the-art molecular dynamics simulations to understand the stability of glasses and their suitability for long-term encapsulation of nuclear waste.

We calculate several important properties of novel glass compositions including the activation energy for crystallization and phase separation as well as structure. We compare our results with the structural and thermodynamic experiments performed by our US partners. This will enable us to gain atomistic understanding of what governs stability of glasses at the microscopic level and predict their long-term performance.

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