Executive summary
Date(s) of inspection:
Aim of inspection
To provide regulatory confidence in relation to Radiation Protection and compliance with Ionising Radiations Regulations 2017 (IRR17) and LC18 - Radiological protection.
To asses the extent the Hartlepool team is equipped to start making the transition from operation to defueling, deconstruction and ultimately decommissioning.
Subject(s) of inspection
- IRR17 - Rating: Green
- LC 18 - Radiological protection - Rating: Green
Key findings, inspector's opinions and reasons for judgement made
The intervention focussed on the following:
Summary of outage programmed work and its radiological implications.
- NGL Radiation Protection personnel organisation including level of support available.
- Outage contractor selection, training, control, supervision, and competence.
- Role of Radiation Protection Supervisor (RPS)
- Radiation survey instrument maintenance and support arrangements including adequate monitoring equipment resources for the outage.
- Radiation protection input to outage work planning including use of revised risk assessment arrangements.
- Operational dose management, i.e. day-to-day dose management and profiling during the outage.
- Radiological event investigation and follow-up including response to leakages and spillages of radioactive material.
- Radioactive source management.
- Health Physics (HP) clearance arrangements.
We found adequate arrangements were in place for the 2023 R2 2013 Statutory Outage and I judged an overall inspection rating of green was appropriate.
I will raise a Level 4 regulatory issue over the failure to address the requirement for contingency plans in the Radiation Risk Assessment examined.
At the time of the inspection, an internal investigation was ongoing into recent events where contract staff entered C3 areas without suitable respiratory protective equipment. I will not be taking any action in response to these events until the conclusion of the investigations. Initial actions taken by EDF appeared to be appropriate.
Conclusion
The inspection findings were presented to NGL at the close of the inspection.
We found adequate arrangements relating to IRR 17 requirements specifically with regard to operational doses management, contractor supervision and control, availability and maintenance of radiological protection survey instruments, radioactive source management and assessment of risk.