Transport: Ste Mahay

The secondment was working within the Transport Safety Team. I was producing an improved model for estimating a maximum annual radiation dose rates to HGV drivers, who in the future may transport highly radioactive waste. This work will help work out whether this method of transport, driving materials from a nuclear site to a proposed deep geological repository within the United Kingdom, is viable in the future.

It involved using Excel and VBA (the programming language upon which Excel is written) to program a model which utilises the Monte-Carlo technique in order to assess the likely maximum driver doses, given the radioactive inventory of a particular site.

This model and its report will form part of the Transport Safety Assessment and hence, part of the safety case for the future repository. By the end of the placement, the model was looking to be incorporated into the TranSAT (TRANsport Safety Assessment Toolkit) which is used in the risk assessments.

The conclusions of the report suggested that different methods would need to introduce for different sites in order to minimise dose.