The Use of a Thermal Probe to Determine the Effective Thermal Conductivity of Packaging Contents*

Contact-handled transuranic (CH-TRU) waste materials are nonradioactive items contaminated with alpha-emitting ttansuranium rad.ionuclides. The most common transuranium radionuclides in the waste are plutonium and associated daughter products. These contaminants are usually in the fonn of oxides and are embedded, trapped, or otherwise attached to a variety of inert host or parent materials. Due to the high efficiencies of the recovery process, the actual contaminants are nonnally small in size and the contaminants remaining in the waste are usually well attached to their host.