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. 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 5 different NII Inspectors visited the Dungeness A site during the quarter. Inspections were made on the following days:
19 -22 April 10 -13 May 2 -3 June 21-24 June
2. 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 covered:
Reactor 1 was shutdown on 16 April 2004 for its biennial outage, whereby Station staff and contractors conduct maintenance, modification and inspection activities, which cannot be performed whilst the reactor is at power. Inspections undertaken by NII did not reveal any significant shortcomings in the arrangements or conduct of outage activities. Some of the work related to the graphite core, reactor pressure vessel internals and a main coolant circulator drive took longer than anticipated and at the time of writing the work was still ongoing. NII expect to give consent to start up the reactor in mid-July.
An unusual feature of this outage is the additional inspection and maintenance work undertaken by the station to assist them in making a safety case for either a limited scope shutdown in July 2006 or an extension to the operating interval to effectively take the station to the end of its operational life in December 2006.
NII gave permission to allow a project to commence to retrieve some 30 tonnes of fuel element waste components from 2 storage vaults. This waste is classed as intermediate level waste (ILW) and follows the successful retrieval and safe processing of nearly 70 tonnes of similar waste magnox material in the existing dissolution plant. A further regulatory hold-point has been placed on the active commissioning phase of this project; the only novel feature being in relation to retrieval and transport of the waste from the vaults, which are in another building, to the processing plant.
One of the HSE area conventional safety inspectors made a visit to site to review the arrangements in place for working with asbestos during the outage and in the event of a need to perform emergency work. Overall he was content with the management arrangements in place.
6. As part of its regulation under the nuclear site licences NII issues formal regulatory documents, which include Consents, Approvals, Directions, and Licence Instruments 1(LI). For Dungeness A, during the quarter NII issued four such documents: -
1. Licence 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 27 July 2004 Back to Local Liaison Committee reports index page