Projected Consequence for Potential Sabotage Events Related to Spent Fuel Shipments

There is a growing interest in understanding the potential consequences of malevolent acts against shipments of nuclear waste and/or material. Recently, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) conducted a study' to evaluate the potential source terms available for release in a sabotage event for spent fuel shipments. Using these source terms, we developed an approach to assess the potential radiological consequences of the hypothesized events and to compare them to consequences of transportation accidents involving the same types of shipments. Our analysis showed that there could be orders of magnitude differences in consequence for urban, suburban, and rural events. Sabotage consequences could be orders of magnitude higher than those of transportation accidents with a probability of 10-12 or higher and be similar to events with a probability less than 10-12. Also, explosive-induced buoyancy would disperse the source further out than a non-buoyant release in a transportation accident, which, therefore, would have a higher dose near the release point