Health and safety remains at the forefront of processing

As the lead project for nuclear reactor decommissioning in the UK, Project WAGR aims to show that the Windscale Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor at Sellafield can be dismantled safely and cost effectively, with minimum risk to the environment.

The project is important for two main reasons. First and foremost is the need to ensure absolute safety in dismantling plant and equipment, parts of which remain damagingly radioactive twenty years after the reactor was shutdown and defuelled - and will remain so for perhaps centuries to come. And second is the commercial significance of what amounts to a demonstration project to show to the rest of the world's nuclear power industry.

The WAGR Project, being handled by BNFL on behalf of the UKAEA, is one of the unsung successes at Sellafield - a name that unfortunately only ever seems to gain publicity for the wrong reasons. Although strictly speaking, UKAEA's power reactor site still carries the original Windscale name, being on the same site as BNFL cannot have helped from an image point of view.

BNFL continues to have its problems, both commercial and political. But in the crucial area of plant safety it is a shining example of the best of process engineering and operation. Always under scrutiny, for obvious reasons, Sellafield's plant managers report each and every safety-related incident.

In the site's latest weekly newsletter, for example, the 'event reports' list just two - an employee who chipped a bone in his knee while moving office furniture between buildings, and another hit on the head and shoulders by a filled laundry bag. Although both workers briefly visited hospital, neither event would normally warrant any publicity at all. But this was Sellafield, after all, where any event can quickly disprove the adage 'no news is good news'.

Not that Sellafield and BNFL are unique in this respect, of course. All the main process industries only ever seem to hit the headlines when something has gone wrong. In the immediate aftermath of plant disasters like Toulouse, it can be very difficult for those in and associated with the industry to argue that safety is at the top of all companies' priorities. But the evidence is there to prove the case.

Take, for example, the results of a new survey into training trends among UK businesses. Carried out by Capita Learning & Development, the survey shows that health and safety skills come top of the list of training needs that the chemical industry wants to invest in. Behind health and safety in the list of priorities, came communication skills and team working. For UK firms generally, health and safety came behind communication, computer and IT skills in their training priorities.

As Capita's managing director Christine Garner says: 'Health and safety training has always been critical for the chemical industry, but it was interesting to see communication skills and team working coming out close behind as prominent areas of demand.' Let's hope that these new-found communication skills can continue to spread the good news about the safety record of the process industries.