Radioactive Materials Transport Accident Analysis

Over the last 25 years, one of the major issues raised regarding radioactive material transportation has been the risk of severe accidents. While numerous studies have shown that traffic fatalities dominate the risk, modeling the risk of severe accidents has remained one of the most difficult analysis problems. This paper will show how models that were developed for nuclear spent fuel transport accident analysis can be adopted to obtain estimates of release fractions for other types of radioactive material such as vitrified highlevel radioactive waste. The paper will also show how some experimental results from fire experiments involving low level waste packaging can be used in modeling transport accident analysis with this waste form. The results of the analysis enable an analyst to clearly show the differences in the release fractions as a function of accident severity. The paper will also show that by placing the data in a database such as ACCESS™, it is possible to obtain risk measures for transporting the waste forms along proposed routes from the generator site to potential final disposal sites.