Class 7 Radioactive Material: Section 10 Packing, Labelling, Documentation & Stowage

Class 7 Radioactive Material: Section 10 Packing, Labelling, Documentation & Stowage

Every other hazard class draws its packing rules from Section 5, its packaging specifications from Section 6, its marks and labels from Section 7, and its documentation from Section 8. Class 7 does not. Radioactive material has a dedicated chapter — Section 10 — that carries all of those requirements in one place, because the hazard is radiological rather than chemical and the controls are built on standards developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

If you take one navigation habit from this section, take this one: when the entry is Class 7, go to Section 10 first.

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1. What Section 10 Contains

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2. Completing the Category Labels

The three category labels — I-WHITE, II-YELLOW and III-YELLOW — are not simply applied; the shipper must write information onto them. Each label carries entry boxes:

• Contents: the name or symbol of the radionuclide (for example Co-60, I-131, Tc-99m).
• Activity: the maximum activity of the radioactive contents during transport, expressed in becquerels with the appropriate SI prefix (GBq, TBq).
• Transport Index: entered on Category II-YELLOW and Category III-YELLOW labels only. A Category I-WHITE label has no Transport Index box, because a I-WHITE package by definition has a Transport Index of zero.

Two category labels must be affixed, on opposite sides of the package. Where the package also has a subsidiary risk — a radioactive material that is also corrosive or flammable, for example — the subsidiary risk label is applied as well.

Frequent error: leaving the Transport Index box blank on a YELLOW label, or writing a Transport Index onto a I-WHITE label. Both are rejection items on the radioactive acceptance checklist.

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3. Transport Index Totals and Aircraft Limits

The Transport Index is a radiation-control budget, and it is additive. A single package with a low Transport Index is harmless; two hundred of them stacked together are not.

• Passenger aircraft: the sum of the Transport Indexes carried must not exceed 50.
• Cargo aircraft: the sum must not exceed 200.

The individual package limit is a Transport Index of 10 for packages not carried under exclusive use. These totals are exactly why the NOTOC records the cumulative Transport Index, and why the pilot-in-command verifies the totals before accepting the load.

Certain package types are additionally restricted on passenger aircraft: Type B(M) packages, packages under exclusive use, and consignments requiring special arrangement are not carried on passenger-carrying aircraft.

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4. Separation from People and from Film

Radiation dose accumulates over the whole duration of a flight, so proximity matters in a way that has no parallel in the other classes. Section 9 provides separation distance tables that load planners must apply:

1. Separation from persons — radioactive packages must be stowed at a minimum distance from any compartment occupied by passengers or crew and from any regularly occupied working position. The required distance is read from the separation table using the total Transport Index of the consignment and the flight duration: the higher the Transport Index and the longer the flight, the greater the separation.
2. Separation from undeveloped photographic film — radiation fogs film. A separate table gives the distances needed to protect film and photographic plates carried as cargo on the same aircraft.
3. Separation from live animals — the same protective logic applies.

Because the separation depends on flight time, a consignment that is compliant on a two-hour sector may be non-compliant on a twelve-hour sector with the same aircraft and the same stowage position. Load planners must recompute rather than reuse a previous load plan.

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5. Documentation Specifics

A Class 7 consignment uses a Shipper's Declaration, but the RADIOACTIVE box is selected rather than NON-RADIOACTIVE, and the declaration carries additional entries that no other class requires:

• The name or symbol of each radionuclide;
• A description of the physical and chemical form of the material, or a statement that it is special form or low dispersible;
• The maximum activity of the radioactive contents during transport;
• The category of the package (I-WHITE, II-YELLOW, III-YELLOW);
• The Transport Index, for II-YELLOW and III-YELLOW packages;
• The criticality safety index, where fissile material is involved;
• The identification mark of any competent authority approval certificate applicable to the consignment.

Radioactive and non-radioactive dangerous goods must not be combined on the same declaration line, and the shipment type boxes must be struck out correctly — the deletion rules taught for the general declaration apply here without modification.