Health and Safety
Executive / Commission
Nuclear
LLC reports
This report is issued as part of the Health and Safety Executive's commitment to make information about inspection and regulatory activities relating to the above site available to the public. It is for distribution to members of the Dungeness Power Station Local Community Liaison Council (LCLC) and covers activities associated with the regulation of safety at Dungeness A Nuclear Power Plant. These reports are distributed quarterly. Site Inspectors of HM Nuclear Installations Inspectorate attend LCLC meetings and will be happy to respond to any questions raised there by members. Any other person wishing to enquire about matters covered by this report may contact HSE's Nuclear Directorate Information Centre on 0151-951-4103.
1. A total of 8 different NII Inspectors visited the Dungeness A site during the quarter. Inspections were made on the following days:
7-9 April2. Inspections are undertaken for the purpose of monitoring compliance with (i) the conditions attached by HSE to the nuclear site licences, and (ii) other relevant provisions of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974, including the Ionising Radiations Regulations 1999. In this period routine inspections included:
3. Reactor 2 was shutdown during April 03 for its biennial outage, whereby Station staff conduct maintenance, modification and inspection activities which cannot be performed whilst the reactors are at power. Inspections by specialist NII inspectors did not reveal any significant shortcomings in the arrangements and conduct of outage activities and permission was granted in early May to re-start the reactor.
4. New NII site inspector: NII has a policy of rotating its site inspectors about every 3 to 4 years, as a result a new nominated site inspector for Dungeness A took over on 1 April 2003.
5. Team Inspection: As part of the NII outage inspection effort a small team of NII Quality Assurance specialists undertook a 3 day inspection of several aspects of the work control and associated arrangements. The Team was generally satisfied with only one requirement being left with the Station to fulfil.
6. Unplanned Reactor Shutdowns: In early May the Station shut down both reactors because of some leaking pipework in a cooling water circuit. This was a prudent measure and other potentially similarly affected pipework was inspected. Four 1.5m long sections of pipework were also replaced. Clearly the maintenance regime for this pipework was weak and additional inspections of pipework will be carried out in future reactor outages. NII was content with the way that Station staff reacted to this incident.
7. Contamination Incidents: Following several contamination control related incidents NII wrote to the Station Manager asking him to review and improve the situation. An internal working group has been set up at Dungeness A to devise and implement procedures and practices that aim to minimise recurrences of this type of event. The Site Inspector and a specialist NII inspector visited site in June to discuss the response to these events, adequate progress was evident. The NII site inspector will continue to monitor the work of the group, which has already identified several areas for improvement.
8. As part of its regulation under the nuclear site licences NII issues formal regulatory documents, which include Consents, Approvals, Directions, and Licence Instruments 1. For Dungeness A, during the quarter NII issued two such documents, these were: -
Licence Instrument No 38 - Giving agreement to implement modifications to Charge Hall Roof Beams.Consent No 17 - Granting permission to restart reactor 2 following its statutory biennial outage.
1Licence Instruments are issued to acknowledge receipt of specified documents, eg proposals for a new or modified plant; to stipulate whether the Inspectorate intends to examine these documents, or to agree to the start of a particular phase of construction, commissioning, modification, or decommissioning.Published on the HSE web site 18 August 2003