- Site: Heysham 2
- IR number: 19-199
- Date: March 2020
- LC numbers: 18
Executive summary
Purpose of Intervention
I carried out this intervention in my capacity as the Radiological Protection inspector for Operating Reactors.
Relevant ONR guidance was used during the inspection, in particular, Nuclear Safety Technical Inspection Guide, NS-INSP-GD-054 Revision 6 (the Ionising Radiations Regulations 2017).
Explanation of Judgement if Safety System Not Judged to be Adequate
No safety system inspection was undertaken, hence this is not applicable.
Key Findings, Inspector's Opinions and Reasons for Judgements Made
My inspection did not reveal any significant nuclear safety issues that required action by the Licensee or follow-up by ONR. In my judgement and from a radiological protection standpoint, the Station is conducting its outage to a sufficient standard of risk management and dose restriction, and in accordance with its outage plan in this regard.
I identified two matters that I informed the station staff that I would follow up:
- The Station’s practice regarding internal dose monitoring is to take one pre and one post outage sample for all isotopes. In the case of tritium, which has a biological half-life of around 10 days, I had initial concerns that this could lead to doses early in the outage being underestimated; however following examination of the levels encountered by staff, I concluded that these doses were not significant.
- I informed the corporate RPA representative that I would look further into the corporate arrangements for clearance monitoring that the site was following, to ensure that they were delivering compliance with IRR 17 and EPR 2016. This was not a site specific issue however.
Conclusion of Intervention
From a radiological protection standpoint, I was content with the way in which the Licensee was conducting its statutory outage work programme and, accordingly, I am of the opinion that there is no evidence to preclude bringing reactor Unit 8 back to power in due course.
At the time of writing this report, there were no specific recommendations that I needed to make relating to ONR’s granting consent under licence condition 30 of the Licensee’s nuclear site licence, allowing the Licensee to return reactor Unit 8 to power in due course. I have therefore assigned an IIS rating of Green.