Buckling Design Criteria for Waste Disposal Containers

This report documents analytical and experimental results from a survey of the technical literature on buckling of thick-walled cylinders under external pressure. Based upon these results, a load factor is suggested for the design of waste package containers for disposal of high level radioactive waste in repositories mined in salt formations. The load factor is defined as a ratio of buckling pressure to allowable pressure. Specifically, a load factor which ranges from 1.5 for plastic buckling to 3.0 for elastic buckling is included in a set of proposed buckling design criteria for waste disposal containers.