This is a planned inspection at EDF Nuclear Generations Limited's Hartlepool Power Station, undertaken as part of the planned intervention strategy for the Civil Nuclear Reactor Programme.
Planned compliance inspections were carried out against the following Nuclear Site Licence Conditions (LC):
I inspected the application of the arrangements to notify, record, investigate and report events that occur on site (LC7). These arrangements form the basis of what is termed "organisational learning". The company has good arrangements based on world wide good practice in this area. However there were areas where I consider the station could improve the way it manages this process, in particular to introduce a better trending process, improve the timeliness of its investigations and increase the frequency of its management oversight of the performance of the process, because of this I judged the compliance to be below standard. This corrective action was accepted by the licensee.
I inspected the station's arrangements for providing warning notices on the site and providing instruction to persons entering a nuclear licensed site. These two licence conditions (8 and 9) essentially set out the special requirements that exist on a nuclear licensed site for informing persons on site what actions to take in the event of an emergency occurring and also what the risks and hazards are on the site. I was satisfied that the licensee was in compliance with these two licence conditions to an adequate standard.
An inspection against LC 12 (DAPs and SQEPS) focused on the role of field supervisors. Field supervisors are trained and appointed by the licensee from within key contractors on site and are particularly important when the level of contractors on site increases during a statutory outage which is due to start at the end of this month. The inspection confirmed that the licensee applied a robust and auditable process to train, interview and appoint field supervisors. The licensee is developing a process for continued monitoring of the performance of field supervisors and ONR support and encourage this development. Overall I judged the arrangements and their implementation to have met an adequate standard.
I carried out a reactive inspection to revisit the staffing and SQEP levels within the chemistry function on site. Following an earlier visit last year it was identified that staff moves and retirements had resulted in a reduced resilience within the chemistry function. The station has adopted a number of initiatives to improve the resilience of this function. I am satisfied that these initiatives have provided a way forward to increase the resilience and deliver a fully manned and SQEP chemistry section in the near future and judge this to demonstrate that adequate controls have been re-introduced.
From the evidence obtained during this intervention, no matters have been identified that are likely to have a significant impact on nuclear safety on the station at this time. However where potential improvements are identified these are shared with the station. These corrective actions are captured within the station Corrective Action Programme (CAP) arrangements, in the actions recorded in this intervention report or in the ONR issues database as appropriate. Therefore, no additional regulatory action arising from this visit is considered necessary at this time.
The planned interventions set out in the Integrated Intervention Strategy for Hartlepool remain valid and will be followed for future inspections.