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Regulators Welcome ‘Good Progress’ On UK Design Assessments

Written by NucNet
Thursday, 04 February 2010
Good progress continues to be made on assessing designs for possible new nuclear units in the UK, but many technical issues remain open, the country’s regulators have said. In their latest quarterly update published today the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Environment Agency said resolving these issues will require “high quality and timely information” from the reactor vendors. They said: “The fact that issues are being identified should be seen as evidence of an independent and robust regulatory process, and evidence that the GDA (the generic design assessment process) is working as intended, allowing issues to be identified and addressed well in advance of major construction in the UK.” The regulators remain confident, subject to the timely provision of information from the vendors, that “a meaningful generic design assessment will be delivered in June 2011”. The two reactor types being assessed are Areva/EDF’s UK European Pressurised Water Reactor (UK-EPR) and the Westinghouse AP1000. In their last quarterly report in November 2009 the regulators said they did not find any issues which would exclude the systems proposed by Westinghouse and Areva/EDF from getting a licence. But they pointed out there were “open questions” and technical documentation that needed to be updated. On the UK-EPR, the HSE said it had identified a significant number of issues with the safety features of the design. On the AP1000, the HSE said issues included Westinghouse’s slow progress in providing adequate responses to its questions on civil engineering design codes and standards; a lack of information on external hazards; and a number of issues relating to components where Westinghouse claimed that the likelihood of “gross failure” is so low it can be discounted. Today’s quarterly update is available online

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