Corrosion Behavior of Alloy 22 and Ti Grade 7 in a Nuclear Waste Repository Environment Available to Purchase

Alloy 22 (UNS N06022) and Ti Grade 7 (UNS R52400) are the current corrosion-resistant materials of choice for fabricating the waste package outer barrier and the drip shield, respectively, for the proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. In this work, the general and crevice corrosion behavior of annealed and welded Alloy 22 and Ti Grade 7 exposed in basic saturated water (BSW-12) for four and eight weeks at 60°C to 105°C were evaluated using the ASTM G78 method combined with surface analysis and statistical analysis of corrosion rate. The general corrosion rates for Alloy 22 and Ti Grade 7 were found to increase linearly with temperature but decrease with the exposure time. The mean corrosion rate was found to be 0.003 mpy (0.075 μm/y) at 60°C and 0.010 mpy (0.25 μm/y) at 105°C for Alloy 22 and 0.008 mpy (0.20 μm/y) at 60°C and 0.022 mpy (0.56 μm/y) at 105°C for Ti Grade 7. No significant difference in corrosion behavior between the annealed and welded materials was observed. For both materials the surface imperfections inherited from materials processing did not seem to deteriorate the excellent corrosion resistance of the materials but might serve as the “traps” for corrosion products. The apparent activation energies for the temperature dependence of corrosion rates of Ti Grade 7 and Alloy 22 in BSW-12 environment were obtained as 25.3 (±5.5) KJ/mol and 23.7 (±4.5) KJ/mol, respectively. Although none of the materials was found susceptible to crevice corrosion under the test conditions, to conclude that these materials are immune to crevice corrosion in BSW-12 would require longer-term testing.