We are looking for an enthusiastic graduate with 1st class honours or a 2:1 in an Engineering, Chemistry, Materials Science or related discipline, for a 3.5-year funded PhD, as part of an EPSRC Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) project. You will join the University of Leeds Nuclear Engineering Group within the School of Chemical and Process Engineering. As part of one of the most prominent nuclear research groups in the UK, you will have access to world leading research facilities in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, as well as the opportunity to undertake an industrial research placement with Sellafield Ltd (the UK’s largest nuclear site operator).
As the UK prepares to invest in new operational nuclear power plants, industry and research organisations are also looking to decommission the UK’s existing nuclear legacy facilities. Fuel cladding, and corrosion products thereof, represent one of the major challenges to waste retrievals and storage at Sellafield and the wider nuclear industry. Waste is currently housed in aged storage facilities pressing retrieval and interim storage prior to immobilisation and geological storage. The volume and porosity changes arising are complex, and overall porosity increase and volume expansion is observed in unconfined cases, where reaction rates are appreciable. This PhD project will work alongside leading teams within the University of Leeds and Sellafield Ltd, to investigate the nature of waste evolution under storage conditions in order to predict volume changes and resulting forces generated on confinement packaging. This is an exciting interdisciplinary project, combining chemistry and civil engineering with soil mechanics and geotechnics. It will also involve a close working relationship with the nuclear industry.
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