EARLY STRUCTURAL TESTING OF TYPE B RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL PACKAGES IN THE US TO ENVIRONMENTS BEYOND THE REGULATORY PACKAGE STRUCTURAL TEST STANDARDS

During the 1950’s to the 1970’s, when many new packages were being designed for the transport of a wide variety of radioactive materials, methods to analyze the response of package structures to structural accident environments had not been well developed. During this period, test programs, on obsolete and new casks, were undertaken on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Japanese Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation. At the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), studies focused on how such packages reacted to the structural test environments specified in the Transport Regulations. At Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), studies focused primarily on tests that went beyond those required by the regulations. Two of the cask designs tested at ORNL were also tested to extreme environments at SNL, which allowed direct comparison of results for the different test environments. In addition, SNL exposed other casks to test conditions that were more extreme than were required by the regulations. Unfortunately, much of the original documentation regarding these tests and their results is no longer readily available or is degrading with time. The documentation relating to these tests and their results have been surveyed; this paper presents a summary from this survey. Where possible, the results of the regulatory tests are compared with the results of the tests to the other environments. A significantly expanded version of this paper has been published in Vol. 18, No. 3 of the international journal “Packaging, Transport, Storage & Security of Radioactive Material”.