Early Accident-simulating Testing of Radioactive Material Packages in Road Vehicles

Beginning as early as the 1960s, concerns were voiced as to the adequacy of the package test standards imposed by the Transport Regulations promulgated by the International Atomic Energy Agency. One concern that was frequently raised, and has continued to the present time, is that the test standards do not necessarily simulate real accidents. The purpose of the crash tests and the fire test described here, which were done with typical packages carried in full-scale vehicles, was to assess the IAEA standards, their adequacy, and to suggest changes that might be needed to them. They were also performed with a view to showing regulators, users of the regulations, and members of the public that current regulations already provide a very high level of safety for real-world accidents. The tests were performed in the United States of America and in the United Kingdom. With the passage of time, much of the original information regarding these tests and their results has been lost. The few documents that remain have been surveyed. This paper presents brief summaries from this survey of the tests and their results. A significantly expanded version of this paper has been published in Vol. 18, No. 2 of the international journal “Packaging, Transport, Storage & Security of Radioactive Material”.