Abstract
Lanthanide borosilicate (LaBS) glasses are among the most promising waste forms for the immobilization of high-level radioactive waste generated from advanced nuclear fuel cycles. However, the temperature dependence of their dissolution kinetics remains poorly understood and constrained, limiting the integration of these materials into established performance assessment models. Here, we investigate the dissolution behavior of the legacy AmCm2-19 LaBS glass and the benchmark alkali aluminoborosilicate ISG-1 in deionized water between 50 °C and 250 °C using ASTM C1285 (Product Consistency Test-B) protocols. For AmCm2-19 LaBS glass, normalized elemental release rates for boron and silicon increase with temperature before plateauing near 150 °C, consistent with solubility-limited behavior. From data obtained at 50 °C and 100 °C, Arrhenius analysis yields activation energies of Ea(B) = 24.8 ± 0.3 kJ mol⁻¹ and Ea(Si) = 14.4 ± 0.2 kJ mol⁻¹, similar or slightly lower than those previously reported for two other compositions of LaBS glasses. No secondary phases or alteration layers were detected by SEM-EDX or pXRD. These results establish one of the first temperature-dependent kinetic datasets for LaBS glass dissolution, providing quantitative parameters to inform mechanistic corrosion models and predictive simulations of glass degradation in geological disposal environments.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE; ARPA-E Grant No. DE-AR0001621); part of the research was conducted at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. DOE Office of Science national laboratory managed by the University of California (UC) under contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The authors thank Dr. Brian Riley, Dr. Vivianaluxa Gervasio, Dr. Benjamin Parruzot, and Dr. Joelle Reiser of the Radiological Materials group at PNNL for fruitful discussion and for providing samples of ISG-1 and AmCm2-19 glass. The authors thank John Grimsich from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Berkeley for his guidance with SEM imaging and EDX measurements.
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J.R.M. – Conceptualization (equal); formal analysis; investigation; methodology (lead); project administration; supervision; visualization; data curation; writing – original draft. D.A.S. – Investigation; methodology (supporting); writing – review and editing. J.A.G. – Investigation; methodology (supporting). T.W. – Investigation; methodology (supporting). L.G.C. – Investigation. E.B. – Conceptualization (equal); writing – review and editing. S.F. – Conceptualization (equal); writing – review and editing. J.S. – Conceptualization (equal); funding acquisition (equal); writing – review and editing. R.S. – Conceptualization (equal); funding acquisition (equal); writing – review and editing. P.F.P. – Conceptualization (equal); funding acquisition (equal); supervision; writing – review and editing. R.J.A. - Conceptualization (equal); funding acquisition (equal); resources; supervision; writing – review and editing.
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P.F.P. declares financial interest in Deep Isolation Nuclear, Inc, and both he and the company could benefit from commercialization of products, the development of which is supported by this research. All other authors declare no competing financial or non-financial interests.
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McLachlan, J.R., Stanley, D.A., Garcia, J.A. et al. Toward the performance assessment of advanced nuclear waste forms: temperature dependence of lanthanide borosilicate glass dissolution. npj Mater Degrad (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41529-026-00756-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41529-026-00756-1
