ASSET MANAGEMENT | SELLAFIELD’S LEGACY
Sellafield and the ONR’s red lights
The ONR has highlighted areas where the Sellafield site is facing ‘significantly enhanced regulatory attention’ as it attempts to manage waste materials from its legacy silos and ponds. What does that attention mean for site management?
WHILE MAKING GOOD PROGRESS IN some areas, Sellafield Ltd has made limited progress with waste and spent fuel retrievals from the legacy ponds and silos due to a combination of technical difficulties, supply chain issues and equipment reliability, according to a report from the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR). Material from Dounreay has been added to Sellafield’s
inventory and this has increased the overall risk and “made the totality of the remediation work more onerous”. Sellafield remains red-rated in relation to the first generation Magnox storage pond (FGMSP), Magnox swarf storage silo (MSSS) and pile fuel cladding silo (PFCS). The rest of the site is amber. ONR says the most hazardous legacy ponds and silos and
special nuclear materials areas at Sellafield “will continue to receive significantly enhanced regulatory attention for nuclear safety reasons for many years to come”. While progress has been made with remediation of the highest hazard facilities on site, there have been a number of delays to some important hazard and risk reduction projects during the year. The most significant are the PFCS and the FGMSP.
The preparation and commissioning activities to
enable export of intermediate level waste (ILW) from FGMSP have been problematic. The facility has experienced technical and supply chain difficulties, “which the licensee has struggled to resolve quickly” and which affected Sellafield’s ability to export ILW from FGMSP into a new interim storage facility. ONR is maintaining regulatory scrutiny of Sellafield Ltd’s work in this area to ensure it resolves these issues. ONR said it took action to hold Sellafield Ltd to its
legal obligations, because along with delays in safety and security improvements it faced matters of legal compliance. It applied an ‘enforcement management model’ (EMM) and captured and escalated matters through the ONR’s Issues Database. It held monthly senior level engagement meetings on performance and delivery and provided advice, guidance and expectations in relation to safety and security improvements. It said, “Sellafield Ltd recognises that there are areas of improvement and provided commitments to us that will be tracked through to completion and should performance not improve, further formal enforcement action may result.”
Above: Sellafield is facing enhanced scrutiny from the Office for Nuclear Regulation 24 | November 2023 |
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