Environmental degradation of materials for nuclear waste repositories engineered barriers

Several countries are considering geological repositories for the storage of nuclear waste. Most of the environments for these repositories will be reducing in nature, except for the repository in the DS, which is going to be oxidizing. For the reducing repositories, alloys such as carbon steel, copper, stainless steels and titanium are being evaluated. For the repository in the DS, same of the most corrosion resistant commercially available alloys are being investigated. This paper presents a summary of the behavior of the different materials under consideration for the repositories and the current understanding of the degradation modes of the proposed alloys in ground water environments from the point of view of general corrosion, localized corrosion and environmentally assisted cracking.