Establishing and Maintaining Governance of the Consignment of Radioactive Materials

As an industry, we collectively consign radioactive materials across land and sea as well as by air. We are allowed to continue in our endeavours fundamentally because the world trusts us to deliver our undertakings safely and compliantly. In order to maintain this trust, there is an expectation that our operations are underpinned with a system of governance that is appropriate to the significance of the materials that we choose to transport. Sellafield Limited (SL) consigns radioactive material as part of its regular, daily business. Each year over 1,000 RAM packages are consigned from the Sellafield Site and around 10 of these represent significant overseas exports. In recent years there have been a number of challenges to these consignment activities, not least the restructuring of the UK nuclear industry which saw the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) secure a Parent Body Organisation for Sellafield, a site which represents about two thirds of the NDA’s nuclear liabilities. In late 2008 NDA signed a Parent Body Agreement for SL with Nuclear Management Partners (NMP) a joint venture between URS, Amec and Areva. Working in partnership, NDA and NMP set about delivering significant improvements in operational efficiency, project management and cost control at Sellafield and, from day one, the new management team had a clear view of the need to enhance consigning capability. Having developed a new approach to the process for consigning radioactive materials, SL augmented the revised arrangements with a governance organisation and assurance activities that have been actively engaged to safely and compliantly deliver a number of international shipments. The SL radioactive material transport governance structure is overseen by the Office of the Consigning Authority (OCA), a management team with the delegated authority of the Company Executive to permission the consignment of radioactive materials. The OCA deploy verification, validation, assessment and audit processes to ensure that safety and compliance is preserved throughout the delivery of consignment, from packing on the Sellafield Site to unpacking by the Consignee. This paper describes the background to the enhanced governance arrangements, the new organisation/process and how this was delivered with assistance and steer from our partners and regulators.