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Abstract
The IAEA-TECDOC-717 draft reflects the development of fracture mechanics over recent years. It has a tendency towards the academic state of the art which cannot be fully matched by the technical state of the art. There are a number of proposed requirements that at present sound confusing to the package designer. Other requirements would increase the cost of quality assurance without necessarily improving safety. Treating the potential embedded ductile iron microporosities as crack-tipped reference-sized flaws represents a highly conservative approach. Drop tests have never resulted in failures, not even for oversized artificial flaws. This verifies the conservatism of the fracture mechanics approach. The stress intensity factors of surface and sub-surface reference flaws are compared to each other in a numerical example. In contrast to the TECDOC statement on this matter they are of the same magnitude.