Estimating the lifetime of R7T7 glass in various media

Fission product containment glasses were the first matrices for which long-term behavior studies were undertaken. A substantial body of results has been obtained over the last twenty years, international scientific cooperation programs have been developed, and a strict methodology has progressively been defined to predict the behavior of these materials on a time scale of several tens of thousands of years. The excellent self-irradiation resistance of the French ‘R7T7’ glass has been demonstrated. Models of aqueous alteration under optimized but realistic geological disposal conditions suggest a glass package lifetime of several million years. To cite this article: É.Y. Vernaz, C. R. Physique 3 (2002) 813–825.