Document Details

Changes to Lifetime Planning at Sellafield and the Formation of the NDA
Author:	Reed, David
Co-Author(s):

Sellafield, situated on the edge of the Lake District in the North West of England, was at one time an ordnance factory, then a part of the UK Nuclear Weapons programme and is now the home of civil nuclear fuel reprocessing in the UK. It consists of about 1000 buildings and facilities ranging from those built in the 1940s to plants still under construction in a site area of about two square miles. As well as modern chemical processing facilities, the site contains old stores of miscellaneous nuclear waste from the 1940s and modern stores containing waste arising from current activities. Next to Sellafield are Calder Hall, the first commercial nuclear power station in the UK (now being decommissioned) and the UK’s only Low Level Waste Repository at Drigg. Together these sites are known as the Sellafield group of sites, and represent about 70% of the UK Civil Nuclear Liabilities. In 2000, a programme of work began to amalgamate a number of business units, and to provide an integrated planning and costing system for the Sellafield site. In 2003, it was decided to introduce a system of Programme Management based on the UK Government’s Managing Successful Projects (MSP) model. This has now been established, and represents a major improvement in the planning co-ordination and management of the activities on the three sites In November 2001, the UK Government announced its intention to alter the way that the Civil Nuclear Industry is managed. In essence, the assets and liabilities of the state owned nuclear operating companies were to be transferred to a new body called the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). The existing owner operators would initially be appointed as contractors to run the sites, which will subsequently be subject to competition in accordance with a schedule to be defined by the NDA. In anticipation of the formation of the NDA, the Government set up a shadow body, known initially as the Liabilities Management Unit (LMU). The LMU introduced a requirement for two annually produced documents: • the Near Term Work Plan (NTWP), covering three years, which underpins the operating contract; • the Lifecycle Baseline (LCBL), which covers the period up to site termination. In the case of Sellafield, this is currently 120 yeas. Both of these documents use a common Programme Summary Work Breakdown Structure, which is also common to all the sites owned by the NDA. T the time of writing, three annual issues of the NTWP and four of the LCBL have been produced in an entirely electronic format, and the Site Programme Management System is being used to report against the NTWP to the NDA, which became a legal entity on April 1st, 2005. The most recent issue combined the LCBL and NTWP into a single document called the Lifetime Plan. This paper describe the way in which these changes have been made, the new commercial environment in which the industry is operating, and the benefits of the planning and reporting regime which is now in place.

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