IAEA sees continuous improvement in safety at Borssele

Dutch utility EPZ has addressed all the recommendations and all but one of the suggestions that an International Atomic Energy Agency mission to the Borssele nuclear power plant made in 2014, a follow-up Operational Safety Review Team mission has concluded.

Dutch utility EPZ has addressed all the recommendations and all but one of the suggestions that an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission to the Borssele nuclear power plant made in 2014, a follow-up Operational Safety Review Team (OSART) mission has concluded.

Borssele (Image: EPZ)

OSART missions aim to improve operational safety by objectively assessing safety performance using the IAEA's Safety Standards and proposing recommendations for improvement where appropriate.

The IAEA, at the request of the Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection (ANVS), sent an OSART mission to Borssele in September 2014. The main purpose of that mission was to review operational safety, enterprise-level management and safety culture. The IAEA made 22 recommendations and eight suggestions for improving operational safety at the plant. A first follow-up OSART mission was conducted in late 2016.

The IAEA has now completed the second and final OSART follow-up mission to Borssele.

The mission - carried out 6-10 November - concluded that all 22 recommendations had been completed and just one suggestion remained partially open. This open suggestion concerns a number of procedures for design-basis accidents, which include procedures introduced after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in the context of stress tests. EPZ and ANVS said these procedures will be rewritten in 2018 to the recently introduced internationally standardised format. This suggestion is expected to be closed in mid-2018.

In a statement, ANVS said: "The team is satisfied with the results achieved by EPZ and in particular about the steps that EPZ has taken in the areas of leadership and safety culture."

The OSART team provided a draft of its report to EPZ and ANVS and will submit the final report to the government within three months. ANVS said the final report will be made publicly available.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News