Constructing Excellence in Wales

Nuclear Collaboration

Can collaborative working and a drive for best practice really work in the decommissioning of a nuclear power station?

Decommissioning a nuclear power station built on the banks of a lake in one of Great Britain’s most beautiful and popular National Parks must be right up there on the ‘ten most challenging projects’ list.

For those who are up to the challenge, the decommissioning of Magnox North’s nuclear power station at Trawsfynydd in the Snowdonia National Park in North Wales is going to be a long job.  No-one knows quite how long the overall process will take because of the lack of a national repository for intermediate level radioactive waste. This facility is a vital cog in the decommissioning of all the UK’s nuclear power stations; ensuring contractors have somewhere safe to house the radioactive remnants of power production.

Selecting the right site is fraught with political as well as geological and geographic issues.  In the mean time the waste at Trawsfynydd has to be kept safe.  So, in a complex scenario the team working on the scheme will recover all intermediate and low level legacy radioactive waste at the site and store it in the purpose built Intermediate Level Waste (ILW) Store that has been built at Trawsfynydd. There it will stay until the site for the national facility has been finalised.

Alongside this the twin reactor buildings which have stood sentinel over Lake Trawsfynydd since the power station’s construction in the 1960’s, will be reduced in height and have a capping roof built within them, covering the top of the old reactor face. Eventually these will be cocooned in a newly built shell before the whole site is mothballed until 2088 in what is termed the ‘Care & Maintenance’ phase. Then final site clearance is due to begin.

Now, if the reasoning behind the scheme is difficult enough to explain, try to imagine the complexity of actually carrying out the work and managing the contracts.

“There was a real need to try and change the method of working,” explains Sion Edwards, head of sub-contract management at station owner Magnox North, “until 2004 we operated traditional procurement and contract management methods, that meant that there were lots of smaller contracts and lots of transactions. In addition we had a series of disputes with some of our suppliers that focussed the mind that there must be a better way.”

That focussing of minds saw the embryonic creation of the Trawsfynydd Strategic Integrated Framework, a group of partners who would be able to deliver the decommissioning from “design to demolition”, according to Mr Edwards. Examples of collaborative working and framework agreements from other industries and sectors were pored over and pulled to pieces in a bid to find exactly what about them would and wouldn’t work at Trawsfynydd.

“The philosophy for setting up the framework was to find out who has done it before and to talk to these people about their experiences. We wanted a framework that could deliver project certainty, increase competence and knowledge transfer, provide best value and foster innovation.  We also wanted to drive costs down through the economy of scale” explains Mr Edwards.

The team drew on best practice from other sectors that have developed framework agreements including Dwr Cymru Welsh Water, and worked with Calvin Snook of Chandler KBS who also advised the Welsh Water team.  One of the key goals was to arrive at a framework that could deliver in the areas of most commercial risk. At Trawsfynydd these are concentrated on the area of the site known as the Ponds Complex, within which various construction, waste retrieval and processing and decontamination activities are undertaken.

So, in October 2005, just 12 months after the initial concept was proposed, after going through an OJEU compliant selection process the final TSIF team was appointed with Costain leading the civils and demolition work, AMEC leading the mechanical and electrical work, alongside decontamination specialist Aker Solutions and technical services partner the VT Group.

“When we were named as preferred contractors we all sat down and talked about the way we wanted this to work,” says Don Mitchell, project delivery manager for the TSIF partnership, “We set out exactly what we wanted to achieve in a Charter and even now, two-and-a-half years down the line it holds up as our collective vision.”

But Mr Mitchell is realistic in his praise of the whole system. Anyone expecting instant payback from this sort of agreement might be disappointed. At Trawsfynydd it has taken a while for the benefits to be clearly demonstrated and for the framework to really start delivering against Magnox North’s aspirations.

There have been a number of obstacles to successful delivery. These include the yearly funding cycle that is a requirement of directly funded government projects, such as in this case where the governmental arm tasked with supervising the clean-up of the UK’s power stations is the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.  Another potential obstacle is the difficulty in persuading people to work in a non-adversarial, collaborative manner when they have become used to a climate of conflict and dispute which frequently happened in traditional arrangements, especially when unforeseen circumstances occur. This type of work which requires significant innovation and flexibility is particularly demanding and calls for the cooperation of the whole team

“It has been difficult, cultural change always is,” says Mr Mitchell. In the early stages we considered whether a ‘Big Bang’ approach to integration was appropriate but we are now moving forward in a very controlled manner that we term ‘progressive’ integration and it is this approach that has started to turn things round. These things just take a bit of time to bed in.”

But bed in, they have. Mr Mitchell claims that both Magnox North and the partner organisations themselves can also learn from the risk management processes that TSIF has developed. There has also been year on year improvement in terms of cost and time including the delivery of several million pounds in efficiency savings to date, a benchmark that the team will continue to push.

“It will be a good year for all of us this year, the performance bar has been lifted that little bit higher but we have to continue to try and raise that bar further and we are doing this by pressing hard on our continuous improvement programme that covers all areas of our work,” he says, “the best is yet to come. The benefits of this sort of approach are delivered in the medium to long-term but I believe that delivered in this way these benefits become enduring rather than transitory.  We are looking forward to engaging fully with Constructing Excellence in Wales and the Demonstration Project programme to help us on our journey and are really proud of the fact that we are the first nuclear project to enter the programme.”

There seems little doubt that the Trawsfynydd project, simply because of its technical complexity and the difficult constraints contractors have to work under, is set to become the Swiss finishing school of nuclear decommissioning. It’s an analogy that Mr Mitchell echoes:  “I have always believed the TSIF model will deliver the best outcome and I am a fervent supporter of collaborative working. I believe that if we focus properly this project can become the exemplar for the nuclear industry. We are potentially changing the way the industry works,” he concludes.

That last thought is delivered with such vigour it is difficult not to see the belief the TSIF team has. Now who said this is a tough challenge?