435-B TRANSPORT PACKAGING TESTING AND EVALUATION

AREVA Federal Services LLC, under contract to the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Offsite Source Recovery Project, has developed a new Type B(U)-96 package for the transport of unwanted or abandoned radioactive sealed sources. The sources were used primarily in medical or industrial devices. To promote public safety and mitigate the possibility of loss or misuse, the Offsite Source Recovery Project is recovering and managing sources worldwide. The package, denoted the 435-B, is designed to accommodate the sources within internal gamma shields. The sources may be located in the IAEA's Long Term Storage Shield (LTSS), or within the original service shield of an intact device. Since the sources are separately shielded, the package does not include any shielding of its own. To accommodate material not in special form, the package provides leak tight containment. As a part of licensing activities, certification testing has been performed. A test plan was developed which identified the specific free drop and puncture tests necessary to evaluate all of the unique features of the packaging. These features include the requirement to absorb free drop energy at the top end by deforming the containment boundary, a heavy payload that could damage containment from the inside in an impact, a dual thermal shield that could be ripped open from puncture, and an array of crush tubes at each end whose performance required validation. Testing was performed with the polyurethane impact limiter foam at minimum and maximum temperatures. Finite element analysis was extensively performed to determine the worst case orientations for free drop testing. Particular challenges for the test were the need to open and re-close the test units in between tests, the challenge presented by two very different payload and internal lodgment types, and leakage rate testing with the test volume at a temperature below freezing. This paper reviews the package design and discusses the test planning and results.