THE FS80, A NEW HIGH CAPACITY PACKAGING FOR THE TRANSPORT OF PLUTONIUM OXIDE POWDER

The reprocessing o f the spent fuel issued from the nuclear power plants allows to reuse most of the nuclear material for the manufacture of new fresh fuel assemblies. It is the case for the MOX fuels whose pellets are made o f uranium and plutonium oxides. Therefore, plutonium oxide must be transported from the reprocessing plant to the MOX manufacturing facility. For the time being the most elaborate transports of such material are those carried out between La Hague and Dessel or Cadarache or Melox. The plutonium oxide is put in different inner equipments which are finally loaded in a type B(U)F packaging, called FS 47. The transports are performed by road by means ofa specific container which can carry 10 FS 47 flasks. Due to the sensitivity of this material, all these transport equipments are specially designed to guarantee a high level ofsafety and physical protection. Nowadays, more and more nuclear power plants use fresh Mox fuels in their reactors. Therefore, the capacity of the MOX manufacturing facilities will increase in the future in order to supply all the MOX reactors and consequently the quantity of plutonium oxide transported will also increase. This evolution offered a good opportunity to design a new packaging with a high level of safety and physical protection similar to the existing transport system, but with a larger capacity for plutonium oxides. The present objective is to increase the capacity by a factor 3, and therefore to reduce the number oftransports by 3. The present paper outlines the main characteristics required by COGEMA to use this new transport system between its facilities. It also describes the resulting FS80 transport system, and more particularly the packaging designed by Transnucleaire.