Leaching Scale Effect for Cement-Waste Forms

The confinement ability of a waste package is one of the major safety characteristics to consider in shallow land burial. In order to determine if the confinement is acceptable, in accordance with local policy, one way is to proceed to leaching tests. The practical method, for sake of simplicity, cost and time limit, is to carry out the leaching tests on laboratory samples which are easier to prepare than full-scale blocks, but the representativity of which needs to be treated with caution; it is in this context, that one of the aspect of our work concerns what is known as the “scale effect”. This study has been conducted using blocks the volumes of which are respectively of 200, 20, 2 and 0, 2 1, and made with the same cement-waste form (13 Cs) system.