Unwillingness to relocate contributing to Dounreay police 'staffing challenges'
A reluctance to relocate to Caithness is contributing to "staffing challenges" at Dounreay for the armed police force in charge of protecting civil nuclear sites.
The observation is made in the newly published annual report on Britain’s nuclear industry during 2022/23 by the chief nuclear inspector at the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR).
It states: "Recruitment, retention and an unwillingness to relocate to the very north of the UK is still providing staffing challenges for the Civil Nuclear Constabulary at Dounreay.
"Despite this, the unit generates the necessary number of officers to ensure that baseline resourcing levels are met. Overall, we assess Dounreay’s security performance to be adequate."
Elsewhere in the section on Dounreay, the report notes that the site has made progress with its decommissioning programme.
Dounreay, a subsidiary of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, became a division of Magnox earlier this year.
"We have focused on Dounreay’s plans to decommission the site and its ability to maintain its facilities, waste processing and organisational capability to safely deliver decommissioning activities," the report says.
"We are engaging with the site as it develops the updates to revise the site lifetime plan, which are due to be issued in 2024. We have also assessed safety culture on the site.
"Dounreay continued to export breeder material from the Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR) to Sellafield, until Magnox reprocessing operations ceased in 2022, with large amounts of the breeder material now removed from the reactor. The remaining breeder material will be removed from DFR and stored in a shielded store at Dounreay until it can be transported for long-term safe storage at Sellafield.
"In the Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR), Dounreay has completed the installation of the Water Vapour Nitrogen (WVN) equipment to remove the residual metallic sodium from the PFR and is now preparing inactive commissioning of the systems.
"Following the sodium tank farm excursion in 2022 we have implemented new regulatory hold points on the recommencement of these operations as well as on the WVN processes being deployed on PFR.
"We will only release these regulatory hold points once Dounreay has demonstrated that its arrangements for operating these processes are safe.
"The removal of the residual sodium is a significant decommissioning milestone for the site."
The report also states: "Broadly, as in the previous year, Dounreay has delivered sufficient safeguards performance throughout the period and has engaged constructively with us in addressing any identified shortfalls in compliance."
Chief nuclear inspector Mark Foy highlighted conventional health and safety and cyber security as the two key themes for Britain’s nuclear industry in the year ahead.
He said: “ONR is here to protect society by securing safe nuclear operations. Overall performance of the industry remained good, and we welcome the compliance, standards and progress in many areas.
“However, the report highlights shortfalls that require enhanced effort and strategic oversight across the industry.
“Conventional health and safety will remain a key cross‑cutting theme, and a priority focus for ONR and the industry for 2023/24, alongside the emerging key theme of cyber security.
“We expect to see industry-wide improvements in these two areas during the year ahead."
Mr Foy added: “It has been encouraging to see the industry beginning to adopt innovative practices such as the deployment of robotics and I am particularly pleased the sector is starting to see the benefits of our enabling approach to the adoption of new technologies."