128 A Tribute to Rodney C. Ewing: Celebrating a Half-Century of Transformative Contributions to Geoscience, Mineralogy, and Material Science
Honoring Prof. Rodney C. Ewing (1946–2024), this session celebrates over 50 years of groundbreaking contributions to mineralogy, geoscience, and materials science, from atomic-scale processes to field-scale applications.
Monday, 20 October 2025
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
HBGCC, 217A
Thermodynamics of Nuclear and Ceramic Materials - an Overview in Memory of Rod Ewing
Paper number: 128-8
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 3:25 PM – 3:45 PM
Authors
Abstract
I am both sad and happy to present a memorial lecture honoring Rod Ewing - sad because he died too young, happy because we were colleagues, friends, and collaborators for many years. Rod introduced me to the solid state chemistry of nuclear materials. Together we explored their synthesis, properties, and decomposition. Their thermodynamic properties can be grouped into two categories - those for which radiation plays a minor part and those for which radiation damage and its recovery by annealing are crucial. In this lecture I review radiation damage in fluorite and pyrochlore structures, with emphasis on thermodynamics and kinetics. Metastable intermediates play major roles in annealing. The return of the damaged state to equilibrium is both complex and slow, with complete recovery often not seen in days to months at ambient temperature. This metastability allows detailed study by structural and calorimetric techniques, with identification of several competing relaxation processes, each with distinct atomistic changes, energetics, and kinetics.
Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 57, No. 6
doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-412634
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