Congratulations to our PhD candidate Ryan Morco who is the recipient of a 2017 Roy G. Post Foundation Scholarship. The Roy G. Post Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides scholarships to students to develop careers in the safe management of nuclear materials and to participate in the WM Conference.
Ryan’s research is to assess the influence of gamma-radiation on the proposed used fuel container’s materials, and particularly that of copper corrosion under the different deep geologic repository (DGR) conditions. He is developing a chemical kinetics model on the radiolysis of humid air, pure water and saline groundwater which are conditions anticipated in a nuclear waste DGR environments. These models predict radiolytic oxidants and their concentrations which are then tested for corrosivity and compared with a radiation exposure experiments.