Rhenium, which lies just below technetium in the periodic table of elements, has similar chemical properties as technetium, and is therefore often used as an analogue for the radioactive 99Tc. Our recent work showed that Re(VII) is a good analogue to study the diffusion behaviour of 99Tc(VII) in GMZ bentonite (Wu et al., 2014). The diffusion experiment in GMZ bentonite was conducted at 12 ± 3 °C to get more data in the transient state to obtain a reliable α value, especially for the non-sorbing