UK Regulatory Regime

Step 2 is a review of the fundamental acceptability of the proposed reactor design concept within the UK regulatory regime, to identify any fundamental design aspects or safety shortfalls that could prevent the proposed design from being licensed in the UK. 

The APIOOO safety case is based on a claims-arguments-evidence structure. The claims for the safety case are derived from the overall safety goals for nuclear power plants and the expectations of the UK regulatory regime. This generic PCSR is a coordinating document that presents the... 

FACTRAN was used in the analysis performed in support of the Sizewell B PCSR (Reference 5.7). There is, therefore, a high degree of confidence that an acceptable verification statement can be made in the context of the UK regulatory regime. 

The radiological analysis that has been undertaken to date has demonstrated compliance with US regulatory requirements. Both the requirements and the prescribed analysis methodology differ between the US and UK regulatory regimes. For this reason, a UK-specific consequence analysis, using a UK approach, will be carried out during Step 4 of the GDA. However, based on the... 

The doses are calculated to be a small fraction of the US regulatory criteria. However, further consequence analysis will be required to demonstrate that the releases are acceptable under the UK regulatory regime. 

Throughout this book the regulatory regime is referred to as Labour Code , a translation of the French Code du Travail . All countries have national regulatory codes, some of which reflect wider imperatives (eg ED directories, ILO conventions, UN standards). In adddition, there are many technical and other codes of practice or procedure produced by national or international professional, technical and industrial organisations. Exampies of the former are the reguiatory codes of the HSE and The EA in the UK, and of OSHA and ERA in the USA and of the latter, the NFPA, which is referred to extensively in this book. 

Maitland, G. (2011) Offshore Oil and Gas in the UK An Independent Review of the Regulatory Regime. Report by Chairman Geoffrey Maitland, FREng, December 2011 (hereinafter, Maitland Review). Lord Cullen (1990) The Public Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Disaster. Report by the Chairman The Hon. Lord Cullen, Cm. 1310, 1990. HMSO London (hereinafter, Cullen Report). The events and responses surrounding the Piper Alpha disaster are beyond the scope of this work. For further discussion on this, see Chapter 6 in this volume. 

Offshore Oil and Gas in the UK An Independent Review of the Regulatory Regime (December 14,2011), http //www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/meeting energy/oil gas/incident mgt/ deepwater rpt/deepwater rpt.aspx... 

Paterson has described the evolution of the UK offshore safety regime in Chapter 6 of this book, The impact of the Piper Alpha disaster in 1987 and the Cullen Report were also very influential in policy making outside the United Kingdom, and the Australian regulatory regime for offshore safety is based on the same concept and premises as the UK regime. 

Some regulatory regimes (e.g. the UK system) seem to have started out as highly independent and powerful, become closer to railway management over the years, and are now being pushed to reassert a more obvious and transparent independence again. 

In 1990 the UK HMRI was transferred from the Department of Transport to the Health Safety Executive where it became more open to the skills and practices of the regulatory regimes in other industries and could look for support from colleagues in the safety profession rather than rely on former colleagues in the rail industry. 

In addition, information is available from several reputable sources, including the World Offshore Data bank (WOAD) of Det Norske Veritas (DNV), which contains data and analyses on more than 6,000 accidents from 1970, the SINTEF Offshore Blowout Data Base on major blowouts and spills since 1955, and periodic studies done for Oil and Gas UK on accidents dating back to 1990. Such a comparative analysis would be useful to the new DOI regime in which BOEM and BSEE are expected to develop regulatory reforms and to their counterparts in Norway and the United Kingdom as well. Performance indicators and the reporting and evaluation of safety-relevant data are discussed further by Blakstad in Ghapter 9. 

Such regulatory requirements are known in the UK, for example, as permissioning regimes in the sense that the licence gives the plant permission to operate under the Safety Management System and associated provisions that were proposed in the Safety Case. Although characteristic of the nuclear industry, such approaches are being adopted on a wider base (for example, in the oil and gas industry post Piper Alpha). 

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