To celebrate his recent submission, PhD student Sam Clarke presented some of the results of his work at the weekly seminar today. During his time at the Institute, Sam has been working on reactive flows through porous rocks, with particular interest in the flows which develop around nuclear waste disposal sites.
Nuclear waste items need to be stored and confined in a safe location for up to one million years before their radioactivity level drops. For this reason, they are often buried underground, at depths of 1-1.5 km. Over such long time scales, some infiltrating water might invade the rock and flow through it, thus creating the potential for some radioactive material to escape.
Sam has been running laboratory-scale analogue experiments, in which water flows through a salty porous bead pack and a salt dissolution reaction occurs. He has investigated the different regimes in which the fluid and the reaction fronts are destabilised by either buoyancy or viscous forces, and has studied the impacts of these instabilities.
The first article describing the results of Sam’s work was recently published in Physical Review Fluids, and is available here. More will follow soon!