Transport related sessions at American Society of Mechanical Engineers Pressure Vessel and Piping Conference, 23–27 July 2006, Vancouver, Canada

Abstract

The ASME presents its Pressure Vessel and Piping Conference annually in North America. In 2006 this conference was officially titled 2006 Pressure Vessels & Piping Conference and the Eleventh International Conference on Pressure Vessel Technology and was held July 23rd–27th at the Hyatt Regency in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The conference included over 700 technical papers, panel and plenary sessions, tutorials, and forums organised into more than 210 technical sessions. Technical papers presented at the conference were broken into tracks based on their content. Concurrent sessions at the conference lasted 105 min and three or four papers were typically presented during each session. At the conference, papers are presented in each of eight specific technical committee topic areas. One of these topic areas, the Operations, Applications, and Components (OAC) sponsors sessions in which papers are presented under several topic headings including Transportation, Storage, and Disposal of Radioactive Materials. In fact, the Transportation, Storage and Disposal of Radioactive Materials presentations represented over one-third of all OAC submissions at the 2006 conference. The nine Transportation, Storage and Disposal of Radioactive Materials sessions were organised by paper topic and included sessions on Introduction, Structural, Regulation of RAM Packaging and Transportation, Thermal (two sessions), Materials Technology, Materials for Long Term Storage, Regulatory Issues – Past and Present, and Glove Box Design Considerations. These sessions were organised primarily by Allan Smith of Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), with assistance from Nick Gupta, SRNL, and Matt Feldman, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Oscar Shirani of Shaw Environmental and Infrastructure. The session titled Transportation, Storage and Disposal of Radioactive Materials – Introduction included four papers. The first paper was entitled Certification of SafeShield 2999A and was submitted by authors from Argonne National Lab (ANL), SRNL, and DOE-EM. This paper detailed a unique certification process in which SRNL acted as mediator between review team (DOE-EM and ANL) and the applicant. By using mediation, a path forward was found on a certification process that had stalled; resulting in the certification of the shipping package for its intended uses. The second paper was entitled Industry Commitment to Global Safety Standards and was presented by L. Green of the World Nuclear Transport Institute. This paper described some of industry’s experience of operating within the two-year regulatory review process and offered suggestions for improving this process. The third paper of the session was entitled Type B Package Radioactive Material