PRIORITY TO SAFETY

Each Contracting Party shall take the appropriate steps to ensure that all organizations engaged in activities directly related to nuclear installations shall establish policies that give due priority to nuclear safety.

A. Licensee and his contractors

Consistent with Belgian legislation the operator has a Health Physics Department (see Article 9 of the present National Report) which deals with safety and radiological protection matters. The Head of this Service reports directly to the site Manager, making him independent with respect to the other departments.

In order to state precisely the nuclear safety policy during operation, the General Direction of Production at Electrabel has established and backs up the following “Safety Chart”, which is now included in the Safety Analysis Reports of the nuclear units:

“The Production of Electrabel attaches much importance to the environment, the health and the security of its fellow-workers, of its neighbourhood, of the population and of any other person involved in the operation of its nuclear park. For this reason Electrabel aims at excellency in the domain of nuclear safety, as this one is an integral part of an efficient management.

With that aim, we organize our activities in adequacy with the following principles:

- Establish concrete objectives and action plans which bring a continuous improvement in the nuclear safety domain. Reassess these regularly in a proactive manner. Involve all fellow-workers in this process and check that they know and understand the objectives.

- Integrate nuclear safety in all operational processes. Optimize the processes in order to integrate the resources as much as possible in them.

- Determine and put at disposal the resources, the training and the staffing so that every one gives the appropriate attention and priority to nuclear safety.

Promote the appropriate safety culture.

Through the involvement of the staff, its exemplary role and an explicit communication, make known the expectations in matter of nuclear safety in the whole organisation so that everyone be conscious of his (her) contribution to nuclear safety.

- Measure permanently the efficiency of this policy: evaluate and compare it to the standards in evolution. Draw the appropriate lessons of its own results and of external operational feedback and regularly submit oneself to external benchmarking. Correct the policy and the objectives on the basis of these lessons.

- Maintain a constructive and open dialogue between the clusters2 as well as with the regulatory authorities and other concerned parties.”

A Safety Evaluation Committee has been set up at each site (Doel and Tihange). This committee comprises the managers of the various services and a few persons who do not belong to the nuclear power plant. It meets a few times a year to examine the operational record of the unit and possibly draw lessons from it for safety improvements, which it then recommends to the Site Manager.

As regards experience feedback, this is organised at each site, and the work is examined by the Safety Evaluation Committee.

The Belgian power stations are members of INPO, WANO and of the Owners Groups set up by Framatome and Westinghouse, which provide a valuable source of information.

The Authorization decrees of the Belgian power stations also stipulate that the feedback from experience be taken into account and, in particular, the USNRC’s Bulletins (or other equivalent documents).

As Belgium participates in the Incident Reporting System (IRS), AVN as the national co- ordinator transmits all the IRS reports to the Doel and Tihange sites.

All the information is available at the two sites, and the operator analyses its applicability to his own units.

Any incident incurred at a Belgian power station is the subject of a deeper (root cause) analysis in order to determine possible corrective action.

In case of incidents or accidents there are of course procedures that the operator must follow in order to bring the plant to a safe condition.

After each reactor or turbine trip, a procedure lists the conditions to be fulfilled before resuming operation (the cause has been identified, the sequence of events understood, the evolution of the main parameters understood, the required safety functions have been fulfilled or the anomalies have been corrected and tested, unacceptable damages on the installation did not exist or have been repaired) and, in case of need, long term corrective actions have been defined.

The Technical Specifications also list the organisations to be informed by the operator in case of incidents; for example the AVN’s inspector receives information about each trip of the unit he inspects.

The organisations which work for Electrabel (Contractors) are selected on the basis of past experience and/or more formal certification according to the missions they are in charge of. These organisations must follow the quality assurance programmes (cf. article 13), and the rules applicable to the design and construction (article 18) and during operation (article 19).

B. Regulatory Bodies

Priority to safety is the basic principle of work of the Regulatory Bodies, as indicated in articles 7 and 8.

With regard to feedback of operating experience, AVN also analyses the incidents incurred at the Belgian power stations and compares his conclusions to those of the operator as regards both root causes and the lessons to be drawn. Possibly, he asks that the operator implement additional corrective action. Of the incidents that are of a more particular interest regarding safety, AVN issues an IRS report, which will be transmitted to the operator and to the Safety Authorities (SPRI et SSTIN) for possible remarks prior to official issue.

From the origin, AVN was aware of the necessity to make the best possible use of feedback from foreign incidents. For instance, at Chooz A a spurious opening of a pressurizer relief valve took

place: the operator diagnosed the incident and controlled it within minutes by closing the blocking valve upstream. AVN (which at the time was the nuclear safety department of Association Vinçotte) reacted by requesting in the safety analysis to consider a break in the steam phase of the pressurizer. This was in 1971.

During the start-up of Doel 1 and 2 and Tihange 1 in 1975, certain modifications were introduced in order to address this postulated accident. For example safety injection was initiated by the signal low pressure in the pressurizer instead of coincidence low pressure/low level. That modification was introduced by the USNCR a few years after the Three Mile Island accident, of which the Chooz A incident was a precursor.

Other events worth mentioning are the Browns-Ferry fire, which led to a number of fire prevention measures, the Salem ATWS event, the degradation of a 48 V board at Bugey 5 which led in Tihange 1 to the addition of two 115 V D.C. boards and four 220 V A.C. boards and complete separation between the control and the protection functions (modifications made in 1986 during the first periodic safety reassessment), the TMI accident with the implementation of the post-TMI actions (new accident procedures, organizational measures, not many hardware changes), the Chernobyl accident with the consideration of severe accident mitigation measures (hydrogen autocatalytic recombiners).

After TMI, AVN systematised experience feedback and created databases (Diane and Ariane) for Belgian and foreign incidents, grouping similar types of incidents and recording the implemented corrective action taken following them. These data banks have been completed later on by “Ances” for the installations which are not nuclear power plants.

A link can easily be established between these databases and the structure of the Safety Analysis Reports, to take the events into account in the safety analysis.

All this information is made available to the operators.

Since a few years, AVN also makes incidents analysis with the help of the probabilistic safety studies available for the units (PSA Event Analysis) and discusses the results with the licensees to estimate the interest of corrective measures.

AVN shares also the feedback of operating experience through its participation to international organisations (IAEA, OECD/NEA, Nuclear Regulators Working Group of the E.U.) and in smaller groups of Regulatory Bodies (NERS, FRAREG, bilateral collaborations).