Development And Implementation Of A Strategic Technical Baseline Approach For Nuclear Decommissioning And Clean Up Programmes In The UK
- Nigel Couzens and Ian Hudson, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Herdus House, Westlakes Science and Technology Park, Moor Row, Cumbria, CA (United Kingdom)
The NDA mission as set out within the Energy Act 2004 and stated in the NDA strategy is clear: - 'to deliver a world class programme of safe, cost-effective, accelerated and environmentally responsible decommissioning of the UK's civil nuclear legacy in an open and transparent manner and with due regard to the socio-economic impacts on our communities. Critical to achieving the NDA main objective and overall mission is to accelerate and deliver clean-up programmes through the application of appropriate and innovative technology. The NDA remit also requires us to secure good practice by contractors and carry out and promote research into matters relating to the decommissioning and clean up of nuclear installations and sites. NDA have defined a strategic approach for the underpinning of operational and decommissioning activities where each nuclear site is required to write within the Life Time Plans (LTP) the proposed technical baseline for those activities. This enables the robustness of the activities to be assessed, the gaps and opportunities and accompanying Research and Developments (R and D) requirements to be highlighted and investment to be targeted at key technical issues. NDA also supports the development of a commercial framework where innovation is encouraged and improvements can be demonstrated against the technical baseline. In this paper we will present NDA's overall strategic approach, the benefits already realised and highlight the areas for continued development. In conclusion: The development and implementation of a strategic approach to robustly underpin the technical components of the lifetime plans for operational and decommissioning activities on NDA sites has been extremely successful. As well as showing how mature technology assumptions are and where the key gaps and risks are it has also provided a method for highlighting opportunities to improve on that baseline. The use of a common template across all NDA LTPs has enabled direct comparison of issues, identification of inter-site dependencies and scheduling hold points and a platform for sharing success and good practice. This deployment of TRLs and TBURDs across all 20 UK NDA sites is unique. The strategic approach is linked into wider areas in NDA's mission including NDA skills strategy and NDA's Direct Research Portfolio. NDA plan to ensure the strategic approach continues to evolve by the following activities: - Benchmarking the success of the TBURD and consistency of TRL evaluation to develop to a world class model; - Development of quantitative as well as qualitative methods of measuring the benefits realised; - Further support the development of technical interest groups where good practice is rewarded, shared, deployed and the benefit realised is measured; - Seek to reward innovation through the technical baselines and continue to develop the commercial framework. The progress described to date has summarised the work to develop the approach and indicated how it has been embedded and applied within three LTP cycles. NDA will further develop the TBURD through international benchmarking to create a process that is world class and clearly linked to delivery and innovation in order to reduce cost and schedule. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- WM Symposia, 1628 E. Southern Avenue, Suite 9 - 332, Tempe, AZ 85282 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 21319810
- Report Number(s):
- INIS-US-10-WM-08480; TRN: US10V0644062001
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: WM'08: Waste Management Symposium 2008 - HLW, TRU, LLW/ILW, Mixed, Hazardous Wastes and Environmental Management - Phoenix Rising: Moving Forward in Waste Management, Phoenix, AZ (United States), 24-28 Feb 2008; Other Information: Country of input: France; 3 refs
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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