Professor Samantha Gateman and her team at Western University use highly localized electrochemical techniques to see how corrosion starts and evolves at the microscopic level.
Their research focuses on how nuclear fuel and reactor materials change over time, and how those changes could affect the containers and components used to safely store and dispose of them for millennia.
So, when Gateman, Western's NWMO Chair in Radiation Induced Chemistry, and postdoctoral researchers Soroosh Hakimian and Shamim Pourrahimi were given tiny TRISO (tri-structural isotropic) particles - poppy seed-sized nuclear fuel kernel surrounded by four protective layers - to characterize, they approached them the way they approach many unfamiliar materials.
