Routing and scheduling of radioactive material shipments

Under normal, non-accident conditions low levels of radiation emission from shipments of radioactive materials are permitted and do occur especially in shipments of extremely radioactive materials such as spent fuel from nuclear power plants. The health risk to an individual from these low doses is generally agreed to be small though finite. Nevertheless, many individuals adjacent to a route and traveling on that route may be exposed to low doses or radiation which results in a much larger cumulative dose burden to the population at large than to any individual. Current federal regulations for the transportation of large quantity shipments of radioactive material do not require under all circumstances that the shipments be routed and scheduled to minimize the radiation dose to the population at large. A more-conservative regulatory philosophy would be to route and schedule such shipments so that the general population dose would be as low as reasonably achievable. This thesis describes an analysis technique for determination of the optimum route and schedule for shipments of radioactive material based on route-specific input data. The analysis technique is structured to allow simultaneous consideration of multiple objectives with variable importance factors. Models of transportation systems are optimized via a network-analysis procedure