Morphological Study of Dispersion Phases in Heterogeneous Waste Form Materials for Efficient Nuclear Waste Containment

The efficiency of high-level nuclear waste immobilization by incorporating a host phase within a hollandite material structure can be increased by carefully synthesizing the dispersion phases inside the hollandite matrix. Also, estimation of the leaching rate from these nuclear waste forms is critical. Hence, conformal finite elemental model has been developed to study the effect of morphology of dispersive phases on diffusive nuclear flux. COMSOL Multi-physics is used as a computational tool to solve a Nernst-Plank Equation to study the diffusion leakage flux. A 2D model is built to identify the effect of volume fractions, surface areas, and different shapes of dispersion phase on the exit flux behavior. The results have indicated that there exists an optimum combination of different parameters such as volume fraction, surface area, position with respect to open boundary, and shape of dispersion phases for immobilization.