Using stained glass windows to understand the durability of toxic waste matrices

Using stained glasses sampled from French and German cathedrals, and from different archaeological sites, this work presents an estimation of the effect of weathering conditions and glass composition on glass dissolution. Due to accurate dating, we also show that stained glass windows allow the determination of the average dissolution kinetics of many toxic elements contained in the glass (including transition and heavy metals, actinides, lanthanides). Therefore, a significant advantage of using stained glass windows, over other natural glasses, is that they permit the direct study of non-stoichiometric elemental dissolution rates, under natural conditions of alteration, averaged over more than a thousand years, and hence to constrain the long-term behaviour of vitrified waste matrices.