Developing and implementing corporate governance for radioactive waste management
Our extensive support to EDF Energy has assisted in the successful management of their HAW liabilities through the full waste lifecycle, from retrieval through to interim storage in anticipation of future disposal.
Hydrock provides ongoing support to EDF Energy in the development and implementation of corporate governance documentation for the management of Higher Activity radioactive Waste (HAW). This support covers the full breadth of the HAW lifecycle, from generation and storage, through characterisation, conditioning and packaging, to transport and final disposal.
Our involvement has included production and authoring of new corporate governance specifications, setting out the key compliance requirements and expectations in areas such as operational/disposability records management, Letter of Compliance preparation and development of Radioactive Waste Management Cases . We have also supported the preparation of the accompanying implementation strategies, which set out the actions required to embed the new governance into the EDF Energy management system.
It has been critical to ensure that regulatory and RWM requirements are duly reflected in the governance. The documentation has been written to accommodate the varying HAW management requirements of the EDF Energy nuclear fleet and provide a framework for effective management of HAW at all stages of the lifecycle. The updated documentation is supported by a series of training packages and role profiles, to which Hydrock provided key input, including the development of mentor guides to support the development of personnel into the roles of HAW SQEP and Disposability Case Project Manager. In addition, we continue to support the records management area, having also supported Nuclear Waste Services (NWS) in the development of their disposability records approval process, including the update of EDF Energy’s fleet level records risk register and the preparation of operational records datasheets for a range of HAW streams.
Interface with other corporate departments/functions and the site teams responsible for HAW has been a key aspect of our work in these areas, to ensure stakeholder buy-in and a clear development path. Furthermore, it is recognised that this corporate governance will also support strategic decision-making regarding the early stages of reactor decommissioning over the next decade.
