Assessing consequences of nuclear material transport sabotage per use of armour piercing weapon

AbstractIn order to predict the consequences of a sabotage act directed against a transport of nuclear material, the present paper is an attempt to put together some components of an approach dedicated to the assessment of the release produced when using a perforating or cutting device to spill out the content of the cask. The category of threat studied here is defined especially with regard to its objective: the objective of sabotage is to instantaneously create a radioactive source term capable of polluting a more or less important area including the vicinity of the target. This definition makes the difference with theft or diversion threats where the material is stolen and taken away from where it has been removed. The work accomplished and reported in this paper is in keeping with the general pattern of the multiyear programme of IRSN where the resistances of various casks to various threats are studied. This paper is structured in two parts. In the first part, the authors summarise as a whole the que...