Scale-up and Leaktightness

Many years ago ENEA and the University of Pisa developed a research program to design a fissile material transport packaging manufactured with common and commercial materials. It was decided to use a small indusnial packaging, a steel cylindrical drum filled with a mixture of concrete and vermiculite, with an inner cylindrical steel liner. The containment system, placed inside the thin cylindrical liner, was in this way protected from mechanical shocks and thermal input to withstand accidental conditions. To verify the characteristics of the mixture of concrete and vermiculite, kept wet between the outer and inner cylinders, many drop and thermal tests were performed. Finally it was possible to fix the better recipe for the mixture and get the Competent Authority approval certificate for a Type B fissile package denominated CF6. Recently it has been necessary to have a larger packagings to move fissile materials between ENEA laboratories, so it was decided to design the CF66 packaging, scalingup the CF6 1.5 times and taking into account the results of the previous tests on the latter. Besides the U and Pu in solid form allowed in the CF6, a small quantity of plutonium solution was considered as a new content also.