A type b(u) package to store and transport medical sources

In Italy for many years ENEA, asked by the Ministry of Health, in collaboration with NUCLECO S.p.a., has collected many sources of different radionuclides no more used in hospitals around the country, and many transport have been performed under special arrangement conditions. To improve the storage of those sources, from the safety and security point of view, and to easy the transport it has been planned to design a Type B(U) package on the base of the experience got in the past with the other Type B(U) models CF6 e CF66. Since the package is intended to be used for a rather large number of content types we started with the easiest as well as the most urgent one: 440 brass capsules containing needles, plaques and tubes of Ra 226 with a total activity of 1,6 TBq. The dimensions on the package are based on the contents, storing constraints and a scale-up of the previous smaller packages which underwent to many drop and thermal tests in the past at the Scalbatraio laboratory in Pisa. Although we believe that a design based on scale-up criteria could be sufficient to comply with the IAEA transport regulation, we foresee a limited series of drop tests to get details on the containment system behaviour to facilitate the design of the new structure needed to cope with its possible content alternative. In fact, while we are working to extract all the sources from several irradiators, with the collaboration of IAEA, it is likely that some irradiator must be transported as a whole using the same packaging type. The paper shows the storage requirements and all the steps carried out to prepare a safety report to get the package approval from the competent authority with the scale-up criteria and calculation codes used for thermal, mechanical and shielding analyses and the experimental planning for the drop test.