Design and Development of the New General Use In-Glovebox Container

Containers play a pivotal role in nuclear materials management at Los Alamos National Laboratory and across the Department of Energy (DOE) complex. The complicated nature of constantly crediting containers due to continuously changing requirements, have increased the challenges on defining the containers performance objectives. Issues have emerged that allude to the need for changes in the way containers are managed in specific environments. Factors such as Material-AtRisk and Damage Ratio are well known and documented for containers used outside the glovebox; however, designing containers for in glove-box applications is more complicated with new requirements. A new Requirements Documentation (RD) has outlined the primary performance objectives for in-glovebox use including being able to withstand a glovebox fire, a drop or fall from a minimum height of 12 feet and a leak test that is completed by immersing the container in water to a depth of up to 6 inches above the top of the container for a duration of two hours. The new proposed container has two different closing mechanism designs including an upright strike-less latch design and a Buttress thread design. The SAVY-4000 container is a DOE 441.1 Manual (Nuclear Material Packing Manual) compliant container that is widely used at LANL. Performance testing and other objectives such as manufacturability, ease of use and safety, will be used to decide the final design. The new container will also be able to be incorporated into other existing container systems, such as the SAVY-4000. This paper will discuss the various container designs being evaluated for the aforementioned applications.