Anomalies and challenges of the IAEA regulations that effect the transportation of radiopharmaceuticals - Presentation

The IAEA regulations have since their inception ensured that the transport of radioactive material is safe. This is testified by the number of packages that are transported annually with no problem and with no safety issues to the public. As the IAEA regulations have been updated to take into account changing technology and policies e.g. Quality Assurance, some of the older redundant requirements have not been removed. One case is exclusive use shipment limits for normal radioactive material. For radioactive material the Radiation Protection Programme (RPP) covers the requirements for dose control to workers and to the general public. When the RPP was instigated within the modal regulations, the exclusive use requirements stayed as they were; they were originally in place as a simple protection programme to the workers and the general public. Now that the RPP has been in place for a number of years, the exclusive use limits to vehicles carrying normal RAM should be removed for conveyances. In some countries the exclusive use limit is used as a limit per vehicle and this can cause problems with the distribution of radioactive material. The need to limit the Transport Index per road vehicle is not required as the vehicle dose limits must be measured and be within the regulatory requirements. Revoking this requirement would allow more flexibility in moving RAM, improve utilisation of vehicles and be more environmentally friendly. The other change that would help the industry, help it to be greener with packaging and have no detrimental effect to the safety in transport is a review of the 20% increase in radiation level of any external surface for Type A packages after testing, paragraph 646 (b) TS-R-1. This in reality is easy at high dose rates, for instance if the package has a starting surface dose rate (SDR) of 1500 μSv/h 20% is an increase of 300 μSv/h. At low levels SDR say 2 μSv/h the increase is 0.4 μSv/h, extremely difficult to measure. Our suggestion is that the SDR should be limited to an increase of up to the category level for Cat I and Cat II packages and 20% for Cat III packages.