Ensuring safety in the Air transport of radioactive materials: Regulations, methodologies, and probabilistic safety assessment

Abstract

The paper is focused on comprehensive study on air transportation of radioactive materials, covering regulations and requirements, hazard identification and proposed a methodology to apply the Probabilistic Safety Assessment to assess the nuclear safety risks associated with the transportation of radioactive material. The systematic methodology starts with identification of different accident scenarios associated with air transportation and estimation of its likelihood that leads to consequences.

The accidents involving the radioactive material has sensitive information and such information is not publicly available. Therefore, the generic accident data can be utilized to develop the probabilistic models and to quantify the risk associated with radioactive material transportation. Even though, the probability of occurrence of an event associated with air transportation of radioactive material is low, but not negligible, hence these events can be correlated to low probability high consequences extreme events. As the associated statistics for air nuclear accidents are insufficient for the development of probabilistic models, so the generic air accident data can be used to give the predictions for accident frequency. For the data analysis a new tool is developed, and its technical bases and integration with probabilistic models are discussed in this paper. A comprehensive probabilistic assessment for air accidents is performed and an event tree for air accidents is proposed with detailed discussion on risk quantification and results insights; and finally, conclusions are presented.