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Description
In accordance with paragraph 308 of the IAEA Regulation for the Safe Transport of Radioactive Material, the competent authority is required to carry out periodic dose assessments to members of the public due to the transport of radioactive material.
For the scope of this study ISIN - National Inspectorate for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection, which is the Italian regulatory authority for nuclear safety and radiation protection, decided to focus on the transport of radiopharmaceuticals in the province of Rome. This because transport of radiopharmaceuticals is responsible for about 90 % of packages and IT transported all over the Italian territory and the province of Rome is one of the most affected by transport of radioactive material.
The dataset is related to road transport of packages in 2022 and it is obtained from STRIMS, the ISIN Traceability System for Radioactive Waste, Nuclear Materials and Ionizing Radiation Sources. This traceability system has been developed to comply with a requirement set Legislative Decree 101/2020, the national implementation of the Euratom Directive n. 2013/59. According to this Decree, ISIN was commissioned to implement the STRIMS traceability system that allows the tracking of the entire life cycle of an ionizing radiation source from its production, placement on the market and until its final disposal as radioactive waste.
The dose assessment was performed using the computer code NRC-RADTRAN 1.0, considering only normal conditions of transport. The dataset is taken by STRIMS, the ISIN Traceability System for Radioactive Waste, Nuclear Materials and Ionizing Radiation Sources. ISIN required the collaboration of transport operators to collect additional information like routes and departure times.
This article presents a description of the methodology used, the analyzed scenarios and a summary of results obtained.
The results show the estimated annual effective dose to residents and to drivers and pedestrians for each route considered in the study. It is clear that the contribution of the transport of radiopharmaceuticals in the province of Rome on the effective dose to the members of the public is negligible.
The estimated effective dose for drivers and pedestrians sharing the road sections affected by the transport of radioactive material is 1000 times lower than 1 mSv/year, which is the dose limit for members of the public. Moreover, the estimated dose is even lower than 10 µSv/year that is the level below which the practices are not radiologically relevant.
For the estimated effective dose for residents, the population living within 100 m of the road sections was considered affected by the transport of radioactive material.
The effective dose to residents is also not radiologically relevant. In fact, it is several orders of magnitudes lower than the dose to drivers and pedestrians.
The difference in the dose to residents and to drivers and pedestrians is due to high daily traffic density on Rome’s principal streets, causing two main factors affecting dose to drivers:
- A high number of persons are within a relatively short distance from the transported radioactive packages and hence subject to a potential risk of exposure to radiation;
- A relevant average speed reduction with a consequent raise of travel time, which leads to higher doses to crew members and other drivers.
