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 Capenhurst Local Stakeholder Group (LSG) and covers activities associated with the regulation of safety at Capenhurst. These reports are distributed quarterly. Site Inspectors of HM Nuclear Installations Inspectorate normally attend LSG meetings and will be happy to respond to questions raised there or subsequently by members of the LSG. Any other person wishing to inquire about matters covered by this report should contact the HSE, Nuclear Directorate Information Centre on 0151 951 4103.
This report will be put onto the HSE Website at www.hse.gov.uk/nuclear/ home under “Local Liaison Committee Reports”.The site was visited by NII inspectors on :-
January 18 th
February 24 th
March 14 th, 18 th, 23 rd
Compliance with Conditions Attached to the Nuclear Site Licence
Each NII Site Inspector has an inspection programme to inspect compliance of operations on the site with the 36 Nuclear Site Licence Conditions (LCs). No significant issues were raised from the compliance inspections undertaken during this period.
Capenhurst Site Emergency Plan Approval
A meeting was held with BNFL Capenhurst and Urenco (Capenhurst) Ltd (UCL) to provide an update on the NII consideration of the Capenhurst Emergency Plan documentation. NII outlined the required changes to the submission documentation and BNFL & UCL agreed to arrange for the documents to be revised. The revised documents were subsequently submitted to NII and the Approval of the plan issued.
Capenhurst Near Term Work Plans
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) requires all sites, which will come under their control in April 2005, to compile the long term and short term work plans for the site into two standard documents ie Life Cycle Baseline (LCBL) and Near Term Work Plan (NTWP). NII has attended various meetings relating to the development of the second version of the Near Term Work Plan (NTWP2) and the NDA reviews of the plan. The information presented by BNFL during the various discussions was largely similar to that presented to the regulators in previous meetings.
BNFL confirmed that the review of the current policy for building a Hex Conversion plant in 2020 and the long term uranic storage policy had been included as a required 2005-6 work activity in NTWP2. NII is keen for BNFL to explore options to bring forward the date for the commencement of processing the Hex tails stored on site.
During the NDA reviews of the NTWP2 BNFL Capenhurst indicated that the scope of work within the NTWP2 had been changed with two blocks of work being deferred out of the NTWP2 timescales ie next 3 yrs. The first related to the deferral to, unspecified dates, of the final demolition of a number of decommissioned plants. The second block of deferred work was related to the programme of waste disposals. This deferral would result in the prolonged storage of waste on site in ISO containers. NII expressed strong concerns about the deferral of this work particularly the deferred disposal of the wastes. Meetings with the regulators to discuss these deferred work packages have been arranged.
Licence Condition 7 Discussions - Incidents on Site - Event Reporting
An inspection was carried out relating to the arrangements at BNFL Capenhurst for the reporting and investigation of events/incidents on site. The inspection covered a number of aspects of the arrangements including – the initial event recording systems, the categorisation of events, event investigations, management review, operational experience feedback etc. Overall, NII considered the BNFL Capenhurst arrangements for Licence Condition 7 were generally adequate although a few areas for improvement in the implementation of some aspects of the arrangements were identified.
Contamination Control Inspection
An inspection of the arrangements on site for the control of radioactive contamination, and the implementation of the procedures within the plants on site, has been carried out. This inspection being one in a series that has been carried out at various licensee sites to assess the compliance of contamination control arrangements with the Ionising Radiations Regulations,1999 (IRR 99). Generally the arrangements at BNFL Capenhurst were considered adequate. However a number of issues/areas for clarification were however identified and these will be progressed with BNFL Capenhurst.
Nothing to report this quarter
Regulatory Actions taken during the quarter –
DATE |
DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
None |
The Inspectorate has powers under the licence to issue Consents, Approvals and Directions. In addition, the Inspectorate uses Licence Instruments to issue Specifications, Acknowledgements and Agreements under either the conditions attached to the Licence, or arrangements made by BNFL for complying with those conditions. The Consents/Approvals/Directions and Licence Instruments issued during the quarter were –
DATE |
TYPE |
No |
DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|---|---|
7.3.05 |
Approval |
501 |
Approval of Capenhurst Emergency Plan |
HM Principal Inspector (Nuclear Installations)