Principles of Corrosion in Nuclear Systems: Theory and Analytical Methods

This article is meant to provide the reader with the fundamental electrochemistry necessary to critically evaluate the data and discussions in the articles on corrosion that follow. As such it has two main sections, theory and analytical methods. In the section on theory, a review of half cell reactions, cell potentials and the Nernst equation, and reference electrodes in nuclear systems are discussed. In addition, a review of the thermodynamics from room temperature to the PWR and kinetics of dissolution and passive film formation is also presented. In the section on analytical methods, we review the principles of potentiodynamic polarization, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, and we introduce a more seldom used technique, Mott-Schottky analysis.