Nuclear power

Early last month there was something of a first for the nuclear industry in this country: two individual employees at Sellafield were issued formal cautions for carrying out work that unauthorised under the nuclear decommissioning site’s approved safety systems.

The cautions were handed out by the newly independent Office Of Nuclear Regulation (ONR), and related to the unauthorised removal of a contaminated malfunctioning resistance thermometer from a High Active Storage Tank pocket during an attempt to repair it.

This was a direct violation of “established, well-known and obvious risk control measures and arrangements for working with ionising radiation implemented by the employer” said the ONR at the time of the cautions.

This meant that the ONR was forced to take action against the individual employees rather than their company, issuing cautions under the Health and Safety at Work Act.

Such minor actions used to be a rare occurrence in the nuclear industry, says ONR chairman Nick Baldwin.

However, following the appointment of a new chief nuclear inspector in November last year, Dr Andy Hall, the ONR has committed itself to allowing its inspectors to use their full range of powers to enforce safety regulations at nuclear sites.

“We have a raft of enforcement actions, but historically we have not used the full range of them,” says Baldwin, who has been chairman of the ONR since it was created as a non-statutory agency of the HSE in 2011.

“Our newly appointed chief nuclear inspector in taking over his role reviewed the armoury at his disposal and said we could be more sophisticated and more fleet of foot if we used a wider range [of enforcements] instead of just using a blunderbuss [of major prosecutions].”

Baldwin also warns that, following the ONR’s establishment as a regulatory body independent of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in April this year, it will not be shy in making public its enforcement actions.

“When we take enforcement action, we will tell everybody, there will be no hiding,” he says.

Publicity over enforcements is part of the ONR’s drive towards being more open and transparent following its separation from the HSE to become a stand-alone public organisation, with greater budget freedom and allegedly free from ministerial interference.

Fewer inspections

While site licensees can expect more enforcement actions and potentially more negative publicity, it is unlikely this will equal more site inspections.

If anything, says Baldwin, there might even be fewer – which will be welcomed by finance managers, given that the ONR recovers all of its inspections costs from site licensees, and in total recovers 98% of its costs from the nuclear industry.

“In the past we worked in technical silos and what that meant was there was no communication between [inspectors in each silo],” he says.

“You could find a site having two inspectors turn up on the same day and they were both surprised to see each other.”

The ONR has now moved away from this model to a multi-disciplinary programme structure focussed on the major areas of work for the ONR, the biggest programmes being: operational and new build reactors; Sellafield decommissioning; decommissioning, fuel and waste programme for all other sites; defence nuclear safety; and civil nuclear safety, including transportation of radioactive materials.

“I would say we are getting smarter in how we do our site inspections because of the move away from technical silos to programme working,” says Baldwin.

“So we don’t necessarily need to do more, because we are much better at organising how we do it and when we do it. [Site operators] are not going to see any more site inspections.”

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