Regulatory Leak Testing of the Bulk Tritium Shipping Package

The Department of Energy requested the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) to design and test a radioactive shipping packaging for transporting bulk quantities of tritium. The paper discusses the performance evaluation on the package’s containment vessels following 10 CFR 71 Normal Conditions of Transport (NCT) and Hypothetical Accident Condition (HAC) performance testing. Specifically, this paper discusses the design features of the Bulk Tritium Shipping Package (BTSP) and the test methods used to demonstrate that the containment vessels remained leak tight following performance testing under regulatory accident conditions. The features of the containment boundary required six separate leak tests on each vessel to validate leak tight performance. The techniques developed for this testing could be used on other containment vessels where secondary penetrations are not available for the introduction of helium or other tracer gases prior to post HAC leak testing.