PNNL

Abstract

Atomic-scale insights into the dissolution mechanisms of borosilicate glasses are critical to the development of the waste form corrosion models that inform performance assessments of nuclear waste disposal facilities. Monte Carlo (MC) simulations have been instrumental in advancing the state of knowledge of borosilicate glass dissolution; however, all such simulations to date have relied on lattices to represent the amorphous glass structure, thereby potentially introducing artifacts. Therefore, a new approach, referred to as the amorphous MC approach, has been developed whereby glass structures generated from molecular dynamics simulations are used as starting points for MC simulations of glass dissolution. MC simulations of sodium borosilicate glasses that covered a wide compositional range were performed and revealed correlations between dissolution rate and structural features of the glasses. Notably, the lattice MC approach predicted the fraction of tetrahedral boron to have a lesser influence on the dissolution rate than computed with the amorphous MC approach. The lattice MC simulations also overestimated the dissolution rate for a given glass composition. These findings highlight the importance of using truly amorphous structures in MC simulations of glass corrosion.