Vitrified hillforts as anthropogenic analogues for nuclear waste glasses – project planning and initiation

Abstract

Nuclear waste must be deposited in such a manner that it does not cause significant impact on the environment or human health. In some cases, the integrity of the repositories will need to sustain for tens to hundreds of thousands of years. In order to ensure such containment, nuclear waste is frequently converted into a very durable glass. It is fundamentally difficult, however, to assure the validity of such containment based on short-term tests alone. To date, some anthropogenic and natural volcanic glasses have been investigated for this purpose. However, glasses produced by ancient cultures for the purpose of joining rocks in stonewalls have not yet been utilised in spite of the fact that they might offer significant insight into the long-term durability of glasses in natural environments. Therefore, a project is being initiated with the scope of obtaining samples and characterising their environment, as well as to investigate them using a suite of advanced materials characterisation techniques. It will be analysed how the hillfort glasses may have been prepared, and to what extent they have altered under in-situ conditions. The ultimate goals are to obtain a better understanding of the alteration behaviour of nuclear waste glasses and its compositional dependence, and thus to improve and validate models for nuclear waste glass corrosion. The paper deals with project planning and initiation, and also presents some early findings on fusion of amphibolite and on the process for joining the granite stones in the hillfort walls.

Vitrified Walls in the Iron Age of Western Iberia: New Research from an Archaeometric Perspective

“…Scandinavian researchers proposed that vitrification was instead related to building processes. Having analysed data from the Viking village of Broborg, they concluded that it would have been a gradual and intentional process intended to strengthen the ramparts (Kresten & Ambrosiani, 1992: 1; Sjöblom et al, 2016).…”