Pawan Kumar

Pawan’s project is the part of the research for a final repository of radioactive waste, performed by the Nuclear Chemistry group. The research intends to provide data and models that can be used to evaluate the safety of a final repository for spent nuclear fuel for a very long time (10.000 years). For this, he is investigating the sorption of tracer amounts of the elements Cs, Ni, Ra, Eu, Am, and Np on some selected mineral phases that are immersed in, and saturated with, water. It involves work in inert-gas filled glove-boxes in a radiochemical laboratory as well as with radioactive substances. The objectives for the work are 1) to get sorption data for a number of element/mineral/water phase combinations 2) to use established
Thermodynamic Sorption Models to model the sorption behavior, especially with respect to pH and ionic strength 3) to merge the models for the individual minerals with the principle of Component Addition into an overall description of the elemental sorption on a complex solid phase such as rock.