Tungsten alloy is the most ideal shielding material
Tungsten alloys are known to be more suitable for storing nuclear waste than other shielding materials such as lead and concrete. This is not only because the alloy has the advantages of environmental protection, non-toxic and non-radioactive, but also because of its high specific gravity, hardness, rigidity, corrosion resistance, oxidation resistance, wear resistance and high temperature resistance.
In recent years, with the development of the society, the consumption of coal and fossil fuels has been increasing. As they are non-renewable resources and the total storage is limited, they will be exhausted one day. In order to alleviate the current shortage of energy supply and to ensure that human beings can live a normal life in the future, nuclear power plants have been widely used, which can be well used to replace coal power generation.
Currently, about 10 percent of the world's electricity comes from nuclear power plants, which get most of their nuclear energy from nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is the process of splitting a massive nucleus into two or more smaller ones. The process generates a lot of heat energy, which can boil water to produce water vapor, which can turn turbine blades to produce electricity.
However, this does not mean that the electricity generated by nuclear power plants will not have a bad effect on our lives. We need to know that any activity using radioactive materials produces radioactive waste, including waste from nuclear power plants. Most nuclear power plants use uranium compounds such as uranium oxide and uranium carbide as nuclear fuel.
High-level radioactive waste (spent fuel) refers to radioactive waste with high content or concentration of radionuclides and requiring special shielding during operation and transportation, such as 137 cesium, 90 strontium, plutonium, uranium, etc. Compared with low - and medium-range reactors, high - range reactors are not only more radioactive, but also very hot, so they are difficult to deal with.
Spent fuel taken out of the reactor is kept in water for five to eight years, reducing the temperature and radiation capacity, while what is taken out is either recycled or transferred to containment tanks. However, recycling is difficult and expensive, so most countries use direct disposal, in which spent fuel is placed in shielded casks and transported to temporary storage plants for 50 years before being solidified, encapsulated and buried deep in the earth.
It is worth saying that the shielding irrigation for high radioactive waste is suitable for tungsten alloy production. Tungsten alloy is a kind of alloy material based on the transition metal tungsten, with cobalt, nickel, iron, copper and other metal elements as additives. Due to its high density, the shielding effect is far better than that of lead alloy material under the same thickness, and it has good thermodynamic and chemical properties, as well as no toxicity like metal lead, so it is more in line with future development requirements.
