Current nuclear criticality safety limit requirements for transporting TRUPACT-II waste containers to the U.S. Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) specify that the 239Pu fissile gram equivalent (FGE) plus two times its measurement error must be 325 g for a payload of fourteen 55-gal drums. The authorized method for calculating a TRUPACT-II FGE measurement error value is to take the square root of the sum of the squared error values for the individual containers (often called root-sum-squares or simply RSS). However, to the extent that the individual drum measurements contain common bias effects (e.g., due to common calibration or other adjustment factors), the corresponding measurement errors are correlated, and simple RSS calculations will underestimate the true error in the TRUPACT-II FGE value.

The RSS calculations assume independence, while common bias effects can induce strong correlations between the errors in measurements. Significant bias effects can occur when the matrix characteristics for a particular waste type are not fully accounted for in the measurement process. Depending on the relative size of the bias error compared to precision error, the true measurement error can be greater than twice that calculated by RSS. In such cases, the FGE shipping requirement may not be met. To avoid underestimating the error, bias components should be estimated and propagated separately (combined only at the final step in the TRUPACT-II FGE calculation), or the effect of bias on covariance between measurements must be calculated. These covariance terms then need to be included in the final uncertainty calculations.