Advanced Wasteform Development for Challenging Nuclear Waste Streams

About the Project

This exciting project will directly support the UK nuclear industry by addressing the management and immobilisation of some of its challenging wastes and by-products ahead of long-term disposal.

The UK faces a multi-decade challenge in managing legacy nuclear waste, particularly at sites such as Sellafield. Many waste streams remain without clearly defined treatment routes, creating technical, economic, and environmental pressures. Many of these materials are chemically diverse, physically variable, and difficult to immobilise using conventional approaches. These include spent water treatment media, ashes and residues from incineration or pyrolysis operations, and other heterogenous decommissioning products, which all fall into the category of challenging wastes. By developing robust and scalable wasteform materials, this research will support safer storage, reduced waste volumes, and more efficient decommissioning strategies. Throughout this project you will be working as part of a larger research group, many of which are addressing similar challenges for the nuclear industry and the appropriate treatment of decommissioning related wastes.

The project will focus on thermal treatment solutions to immobilise these challenging wastes, and the characterisation of the resulting wasteforms, benchmarking them against standard requirements and delivering these findings to industrial stakeholders. This will require you to design glass compositions to incorporate these wastes, to prepare and melt the glasses and characterise them for their key properties using the facilities within the School of Engineering and Built Environment.

Some of the core activities on this project will include:

• Designing and preparing surrogate waste materials representative of challenging nuclear waste streams
• Developing glass and glass–ceramic formulations tailored to variable and impure feedstocks
• Investigating thermal behaviour, melt processing, and material stability
• Characterising wasteforms using a range of analytical techniques (e.g. XRF, XRD, SEM, spectroscopy, thermal analysis)
• Assessing chemical durability and performance under simulated disposal conditions

This project is part of a wider collaborative programme with input from UK and Japanese nuclear industry partners, including organisations directly involved in nuclear waste management. This ensures that the research remains grounded in real-world challenges and aligned with current industry needs. There will be opportunities to engage with national and international partners, attend conferences, and contribute to publications in high-impact journals.

The successful applicant will have a good degree (1st or 2:1) or a Master’s level qualification in materials science, condensed matter physics or an appropriate equivalent qualification in a suitable related discipline. They will be a team player, with an inquisitive mindset, an excellent work ethic and a genuine desire to generate new knowledge. They will have both theoretical and practical hands-on expertise and experience. A willingness to travel to partner institutions, events and conferences is essential, as is a flexible approach to working.