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Glass corrosion

Sharpened interface

Nature Materials volume 14, pages 261–262 (2015)Cite this article

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The finding of a sharp interface between a chemically attacked surface and the pristine bulk in a borosilicate glass is at odds with the widely held diffusion-based mechanisms of glass durability.

Managing and disposing of the vast quantities of high-level radioactive waste is a major scientific and societal challenge for nuclear power generation. To prevent the release of radionuclides, radioactive waste needs to be isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years. The most feasible way of doing this is binding them in a chemically and mechanically stable solid. Borosilicate glasses are an attractive host material for such immobilization, where the radionuclides form stable chemical bonds within the glass structure1. A particular issue associated with such long-term storage is the chemical durability of the glass2. This is because it could come into contact with groundwater, which can corrode the host glass, leading to the release of radionuclides. There has therefore been intensive research on the rate and mechanism of glass corrosion in aqueous solutions. Writing in Nature Materials, Hellmann and co-workers now report3 the observation of sharp chemical and structural interfaces (of around a few nanometres) between reacted and unreacted borosilicate glass exposed to a deionized solution at 50 °C. This evidence challenges the broadly accepted consensus.

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Figure 1: Atom probe tomography data showing an almost atomically sharp chemical interface between reacted and unreacted glass.
Figure 2: Back-scattered electron image of the sharp interface between unaltered borosilicate glass and the silica-rich altered zone.

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  1. Andrew Putnis is at The Institute for Geoscience Research, TIGeR, Curtin University, Perth 6102, Australia and at the Institut für Mineralogie, University of Münster, Münster 48149, Germany

    Andrew Putnis

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  1. Andrew Putnis
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Correspondence to Andrew Putnis.

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Putnis, A. Sharpened interface. Nature Mater 14, 261–262 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4198

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