Inspiring Minds seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferable skills. Students were challenged to describe their research, scholarship or creative activity in 150 or fewer words to share with our community.

Evaluation of copper as the corrosion barrier for nuclear waste containers

Copper is a remarkably corrosion-resistant metal and will be used as the corrosion barrier for used nuclear fuel containers. Used fuel containers are a part of the Canadian design for the safe disposal of nuclear waste in a deep geological repository (DGR). In the DGR, salts, humidity, and high temperature will be present and will provide the conditions for corrosion to proceed. I use quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and resistance probe techniques to investigate the corrosion behavior of copper under DGR conditions. A QCM is a kind of balance that uses the change in frequency of a copper-coated quartz crystal to detect mass changes on the nanogram scale. I use a resistance probe to measure the change in electrical resistance of a copper element to detect thickness changes due to corrosion. This research aims to verify the capability of copper to resist corrosion for the specified period (1,000,000 years).

Mohammad Sabeti
PhD candidate, Chemistry
Faculty of Science - Western University

Supervisor
James Noël

Mohammad is a PhD candidate in chemistry at Western University. He obtained his bachelor’s in applied chemistry in 2017 from Isfahan University of Technology. Then he continued his studies in analytical chemistry at the same university and received his MSc in 2020. His research interests encompass analytical chemistry, electrochemistry, and corrosion. Mohammad’s PhD research is focused on copper corrosion and the results from his work will contribute to Canada’s plan to build a deep geological repository (DGR) for used nuclear fuel.  

You can connect with Mohammad via email atmsabeti@uwo.ca.

View Mohammad's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/inspiringminds/321/.