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. The site inspector and one other NII Inspector visited the
Dungeness A site during the quarter. Inspections were made on the
following days:
12 - 15 July13 -16 September
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:
a. Provision and assessment of safety cases and compliance with
arrangements made under licence conditions.
b. Management of operations and maintenance.
c. Marking of the site boundary.
d. Periodic shutdown.
e. Quality assurance.
f. Radiological protection.
g. Emergency preparedness.
h. Plant modifications.
3. Reactor 1 Outage. Reactor 1 was given permission to re-start in
July 2004 after the completion of all its biennial outage work. The
outage took longer than originally anticipated due to extra work
being needed to justify to NII that the condition of the graphite
core will not significantly degrade in the period up to the end of
electricity generation in December 2006.
4. Unplanned Shutdown: On 9 August there was an unplanned reactor shutdown as a result of an oil leak in some instrumentation pipework associated with one of the main gas circulators. Reactor 2 was manually shutdown as a prudent measure to allow the leak to be repaired. NII was content with the conservative way that Station staff reacted to this event, no safe operating limits or conditions were exceeded.
5. Fuel Retention. NII gave permission for the top fuel elements in the reactor core to be retained when any re-fueling takes place. The benefits of leaving the fuel in the reactor are that less fuel will be transported to Sellafield and ultimately less radioactive waste will be produced.
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 two such documents: -
Consent No 21 - Consent to re-start reactor 1 following its
biennial periodic shutdown (Issued on 22 July 2004).
LI No 47 - Agreement to fuel savings schemes within both reactors (Issued on 29 July 2004).
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 2 November 2004
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