Our definition of an external hazard is a natural or man-made challenge to a facility that originates outside the boundaries of the site and outside of the processes conducted on the site. That is to say, unlike an internal hazard, the nuclear site operator may have little or no control over the initiating event. External hazards include earthquakes, aircraft impact, extreme weather, electromagnetic interference, flooding, missiles from adjacent facilities to name just a few. We also consider terrorist or other malicious acts as external hazards. The assessment of external hazards considers how these have been defined and analysed and how designs have been developed to resist hazards. External hazards inspectors consider if these potential challenges have been adequately defined and mitigated against within a safety case environment.
We do not expect individuals with capabilities across all external hazards. We are looking for specialists with a good working knowledge and experience of at least one external hazard and the ability to act as an informed customer to procure external advice concerning other external hazards. Specialists will have experience of one or more of the following: making their own external hazard determinations; undertaking analyses; developing designs; designing and undertaking equipment qualification tests. Alternatively, they may have critically reviewed the hazards work produced by others. Most of our external hazards specialists have a core discipline in another subject such as civil or mechanical engineering, but an applied science background is also relevant.
We are looking for people with a genuine passion for high standards of nuclear safety and who want to regulate the nuclear industry to ensure it seeks to achieve these standards. The events of Fukushima have helped confirm the importance of external hazards in overall safety cases for nuclear facilities; our specialist inspectors have a role in embedding the learning from this, and other events.
Experience
We are looking for people with specialist knowledge of one or more of the following areas:
- Statistics;
- The science of physical processes which drive natural hazards (geomorphology, meteorology, oceanography, climate science, earth sciences);
- The derivation from near-raw data of hazard level/frequency relationships;
- An appreciation of the uncertainty in the estimation of infrequent events from limited data;
- Extreme natural events such as surface faulting;
- The mitigation by engineering measures of the challenges created by external hazards;
- Development of designs to resist external hazards; and
- Development of hazard qualification test programmes for structures systems and components to satisfy nuclear or high-hazard industrial standards.
How to apply
Please visit our recruitment portal.