Response of Nuclear Materials in Storage and Transport to Malevolent Environments - Presentation

Work related to the assessment of radiological health consequences resulting from a sabotage attack on nuclear fuel storage or transport casks has been on-going since the late 1970’s. While the level of effort in this area has been uneven over these three decades due to policy priorities, funding levels, and programmatic priorities of the countries funding this type of work, substantial progress has been made. From phenomenology of in-cask transport processes to development of aerosol production in high energy attack environments, the analytical and experimental work performed provides substantial justification to consequence assessments that heretofore have had to rely on conservative assumptions in lieu of empirical data. One constant since the late 1990’s in addressing this problem has been an international working group whose primary focus has been to develop source term data from experimental simulations of sabotagetypes of attacks. This working group, titled; the International Working Group for Sabotage Concerns of Transport and Storage Casks (WGSTSC) is comprised of experts mainly from the U.S., France, and Germany. Technical support has also been provided, on an intermittent basis, from the U.K. and Japan. The WGSTSC has pooled resources and expertise to design and conduct experiments that produce the data needed to perform radiological consequence assessments. In addition to the experimental program, this group has also coupled modern analytic techniques with experimental results to understand the effects of high energy density devices on nuclear materials. This paper will review the paradigm that has guided the WGSTSC effort and show how the results from the experimental programs of the past 3 decades has brought us to the current level of understanding of the potential consequences from a malevolent attack on nuclear transport and storage facilities. In addition, the paper will provide an update on the status of the work of the WGSTSC and describe what additional experimental and analytical efforts would be most productive in further narrowing of uncertainty in consequence prediction.