Special measures imposed on Swedish plant

Thursday, 9 July 2009

The Ringhals nuclear power plant has been placed under special investigative measures and conditions by the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) to address deficiencies in safety culture at the site. 

The Ringhals plant (Image: Vattenfall)

According to SSM, a series of failures in safety culture have been highlighted during normal supervision of operations at the four-unit plant since 2005, which measures taken at the plant by operator Vattenfall have failed to resolve. SSM says the problems have lain in areas including management, procedure following, incident investigation and internal audits, with weaknesses in terms of command and control, traceability of internal decisions and compliance with procedures and instructions.

The authority's decision to impose special measures means that it will pay special attention to operational decisions at the plant as well as perform inspections more frequently than normal. It will also require special reports to be prepared on the restart of a reactor after any outage whether or not it is planned, on actions taken after investigations or internal audits, and on how any temporary or interim instructions and procedures are managed. The plant is obliged to report on every decision concerning every startup or shutdown of any unit. The plant will be required to account for why current methods have not achieved the desired results and produce a new program of measures to address identified recurrent failures.

According to SSM, the shortcomings do not stand in the way of continued operation at the plant, although it considers that safety is not given the necessary emphasis across the entire organisation. "This could ultimately jeopardise reactor safety," the SSM notes.

Ringhals managing director Bertil Dihné said the plant would "vigorously" implement measures and satisfy the conditions imposed by SSM. "It's now a matter of working in close collaboration with the authority to ensure that our actions produce results," he said. The special supervision order will remain in place until further notice from the SSM.

Earlier this year, SSM lifted a special supervision order from Forsmark, Vattenfall's other Swedish nuclear plant, which had been in place since September 2006.

Ringhals comprises four pressurised water reactors (PWRs) which began operation over the period 1976-1983. Earlier this year SSM authorised the temporary raising of the thermal output of Ringhals unit 3 by some 5%, from 3000 MW to 3144 MW on a trial basis until a planned refuelling outage in 2010, as part of a phased process to uprate the unit.

 

SSM is the successor to Swedish Radiation Protection Institute and the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI).