Abstract
The fourth International Workshop on Long Term Prediction of Corrosion Damage in Nuclear Waste Systems was jointly organised by the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK•CEN) and the Belgian Agency for Radioactive Waste and Enriched Fissile Materials (ONDRAF/NIRAS). The workshop was the fourth to be held in this highly successful series. Previous workshops include: Cadarache, France in 2001; Nice, France in 2004 and Pennsylvania State University, USA in 2007.
The workshop was supported by the European Federation of Corrosion, Working Party 4 on Nuclear Corrosion (EFC Event N° 329) and by the RILEM Technical Committee ‘Concrete in the context of the nuclear management’ (TC 226-CNM).
The workshop was held at the charming Conference Centre ‘Oud Sint-Jan’ in Bruges, Belgium from June 28 to July 2, 2010. Its objective was to bring together scientists and engineers from various countries, which are developing high level nuclear waste disposal technologies, with the goal of promoting scientific and technical exchanges concerning long term behaviour of metallic containment materials and engineered barrier systems.
In particular, the workshop was an opportunity to compare the approaches that are being developed worldwide for predicting long term corrosion phenomena, including corrosion strategies for interim storage and geological disposal.
The forty five oral presentations were distributed among five sessions dealing with national programmes, experimentation, corrosion behaviour of steel reinforcements in concrete, archaeological artefacts, and modelling. The results of corrosion process studies were presented and discussed on the basis of experimentation and modelling on different materials: carbon steels, passive alloys such as stainless steels and copper. Similarly, the conditions under which generalised corrosion may occur were discussed with the expected kinetics. Main concerns regarding localised corrosion included pitting and stress corrosion cracking. Such topics highlight the evolution of research programmes devoted to corrosion behaviour over long periods of time with damage evolution. Both improved experiments including artefact contributions and modelling progress facilitate the evaluation of the container integrity period and the investigation on the interactions between metallic materials and geological environments.
The progress which has been achieved since the third workshop on long term prediction of corrosion damage is impressive. This is a consequence of the efforts made to increase the reliability of long term corrosion prediction. This is vitally important for possible solutions to nuclear waste disposal issues to be developed.
The Proceedings of each of the previous workshops have been published: the 2001 workshop in the European Federation of Corrosion book series, EFC 36 (http://www.maney.co.uk/index.php/books/pltcbnws/), the 2004 workshop in the Andra Science and Technology Series, the 2007 workshop in a special issue of the Journal of Nuclear Corrosion (Vol. 379, No. 1-3) and lastly the 2010 workshop in this special issue of Corrosion Engineering, Science and Technology.
These publications have been useful to scientists and engineers who are developing appropriate technologies for high level nuclear waste isolation as well as operating nuclear waste authorities and regulators who evaluate possible solutions to nuclear waste disposal issues. The organisers of the workshop are convinced that this special issue will continue the standard set by previous proceedings with a constant increase of the scientific matters and of the technical applications. They would like to thank the attendees for their active participation during the Bruges workshop and the authors who presented and have written papers of outstanding scientific and technical content, taking into account the discussions and the questions raised during the workshop.