I have been active on various ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (B&PVC) committees since about 1975, and since about 1987 I have concentrated on the committee for radioactive material packaging containments, commonly referred to as NuPack.  This committee issued the first version of its work as the new Division 3 of Section III of the Code in June of 1997.  Over the years I was instrumental in getting approval of many changes and provisions in this Division.  I strongly resisted the prevalent philosophy that it is better to issue an initial version of the Code that is not always correct, and then correct problematic provisions later.  I was not always successful, but was successful often enough to feel comfortable voting for the final document as it was issued. As of 1/1/2000 many corrections are still being made.

My thoughts on NuPack are summarized in several papers, the latest presented at the 1998 Paris Patram conference.  Click here to see the paper.

To publicize this Code Division I prepared a two day "short course" funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) and presented it to an audience selected by DOE at one of their facilities near Washington DC in May of 1995.  I made a second presentation of the course at Argonne National Laboratory in June of 1998.  Click on these links to see the course description, and the presentation view-graphs that I prepared for this course.

You can also see the list of attendees, the agenda and the course information page which I developed for the presentation at Argonne National Lab.  These last three links were hosted at Argonne, but are no longer there.  You will see copies I'm now hosting from my own web site.  The pages should open in a separate window on your screen.

After I left Argonne, the people there decided to try to present my course on their own.  The course description page I wrote in 1998, is no longer on the web.  As of December 1999, the new personnel listed as presenters have no prior experience with NuPack and have not participated in NuPack Code committee work.  A new presenter invited from another national lab is a very knowledgeable packaging engineer, but is not a NuPack member.  The other new presenters had not even heard of the Code when they were assigned the task of teaching the course.

I have proposed to ASME that my course be presented under The ASME Continuing Education Program.  If you have an interest in this please let me know by e-mail to .

EDITORIAL COMMENT.  As I just wrote to a dear colleague:

I dropped out from ASME code work effectively a few years ago because the code development process is so ridiculously out of date that I refused deal with it. The idea of sending around pdf versions of marked up scans of code pages is stupid. To have any revision control code developers MUST use version controlled text files. I'm shocked that NRC accepts the resulting code revisions, and feel it is irresponsible that they don't put a stop to the current development process. The fact that we have not had accidents much more severe than 3 mile island is a result of luck and the fact that we are running systems designed and built before oversight by the current incompetent bunch at NRC.

I'm sure we will have more nuclear power plant accidents, but even so, nuclear is still the safest alternative considering the huge casualties of coal mining and the environmental damage from the other carbon fuel based technologies.