Analysis of radiation measurement data of the BUSS cask

The Beneficial Uses Shipping System (BUSS) is a Type-B packaging developed for shipping nonfissile, special-form radioactive materials to facilities such as sewage, food, and medical-product irradiators. The primary purpose of the BUSS cask is to provide shielding and confinement, as well as impact, puncture, and thermal protection for its certified special-form contents under both normal transport and hypothetical accident conditions. A BUSS cask that contained 16 CsCl capsules (2.723 x 104 TBq total activity) was recently subjected to radiation survey measurements at a Westinghouse Hanford facility, which provided data that could be used to validate computer codes. Two shielding analysis codes, MICROSHIELD (User's Manual 1988) and SAS4 (Tan 1993), that are used at Argonne National Laboratory to evaluate the safety of packaging of radioactive materials during transportation, have been selected for analysis of radiation data obtained from the BUSS cask. MICROSHIELD, which performs only gamma radiation shielding calculation, is based on a point-kernel model with idealized geometry, whereas SAS4 is a control module in the SCALE code system (1995) that can perform three-dimensional Monte Carlo shielding calculation for photons and neutrons, with built-in procedures for cross-section data processing and automated variance reduction. The two codes differ in how they model the details of the physics of gamma photon attenuation in materials, and this difference is reflected in the associated engineering cost of the analysis. One purpose of the analysis presented in this paper, therefore, is to examine the effects of the major modeling assumptions in the two codes on calculated dose rates, and to use the measured dose rates for comparison. The focus in this paper is on analysis of radiation dose rates measured on the general body of the cask and away from penetrations