Certification Test for Safety of New Fuel Transportation Package

According to the recent development of nuclear energy in Japan, the transportation of various radioactive materials will be ever increasing. For the purpose of transportation safety, various laws and regulations were settled by the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Transport based on the IAEA regulations. These laws and regulations are applied to confirm the safety of each package design and transportation operation. Safety certification of various radioactive materials in case of supposed traffic accidents are carried out by experimental or analytical method according to the present regulations. And the special test conditions for drop, fire, im.ersion are applied to confirm the sealing, shielding and criticality of the transportation objects. In addition to these safety certifications, a lot of experimental studies are conducted against supposed traffic accidents to confirm the safety margin of present transportation syste.. The objective of this certification test is to prove the safety of new fuel transportation package against a fire of actual size caused by traffic accidents. This project is sponsored by the Science and Technology Agency of Japan, and was started as a 4-year program. Basic plan of each fiscal year and the results obtained are as follows ; FY1989 Preliminary survey and investigation of traffic accidents especially fire were carried out. Supposed accident scenario was exa.ined and the plan of entire progra. was proposed. FY1990 PreliMinary pool-firing tests for about 10 minutes were conducted to study the basic characteristics of the fire of actual size. The a.ount of kerosene burnt is 2k£. Temperature of 20 points in the flame and heat radiation of 3 points near the burn pit were measured. These data proved to be useful for planning the final tests. Also the heating tests of mimic fuel rod elements and fuel assemblies of about 1m length in an electric furnace were carried out to examine the behavior ( deformation, oxidization ) of the specimen under high temperature enviro08ent. FY1991 Mimic fuel assembly and real container of both the PWR and BWR type were manufactured for final tests. The tests were conducted by pool-firing of kerosene for 30 minutes with 11-ton type truck earring container and mimic fuel assembly on it. FY1992 It is planned to summarize and evaluate the result of the above studies and experiments.