The formation of concentrated brines and inorganic salts is predicted to occur due to groundwater evaporation within the emplacement drifts of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. These brines are important because they can increase the boiling point of the aqueous solutions well above 100 °C and a liquid phase can be stable at very low values of relative humidity. In addition, they provide a source of concentrated anions that could initiate or inhibit localized corrosion of the waste package (WP). Critical potentials such as the repassivation potential for crevice corrosion are used to determine the localized corrosion susceptibility of the WP materials under a given set of environmental conditions. However, the measurement of the repassivation potential can be influenced by several factors such as choice of the potential scanning method, scan rate, and initiation of transpassive dissolution. This study provides an assessment of various methods to accurately determine the repassivation potential in conjunction with the simulation of concentrated Yucca Mountain groundwaters to determine concentrations of anionic species that influence localized corrosion.
Keywords: Yucca Mountain, waste package, localized corrosion, crevice corrosion, Alloy 22, repassivation potential, potentiodynamic polarization, thermodynamic speciation