Simon Coles, Dounreay: Strategic Challenges in a Decommissioning Context
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Simon presented his personal reflections of working at Dounreay to discuss the strategic challenges that arise as an industrial closure programme moves towards completion. These included the challenge of attracting, developing and retaining people with the necessary skills over the period to the end of the work. He also discussed the challenge of ensuring that the project outputs align with the desired benefits of the programme throughout its schedule.
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Simon Coles, Dounreay: Strategic Challenges in a Decommissioning Context
- 1. 29/03/20181
- 2. Strategic challenges in a decommissioning context Simon Coles Head of Programme Management Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd 29/03/20182
- 3. The Dounreay site • Located north coast of Scotland • 140 acres • Three reactors • Fuel fabrication and reprocessing plants • Waste treatment plants • Waste storage and disposal facilities
- 4. Dounreay Site LLW Facility Fuel Cycle Area Shaft DFR PFR Silo
- 5. Introduction to Dounreay • Insert Introduction to Dounreay video
- 6. Decommissioning programme • Objective: – Remove all buildings to ground – Treat and condition wastes for disposal – Remove nuclear materials from the site • Completion: Early 2030s • Target cost: Approx. £2.25bn • Contractor: Dounreay
- 7. Decommissioning progress so far • More than 100 buildings demolished • High hazard liquid alkali metal coolants removed and destroyed • Two waste vaults constructed and operational • Waste processing underway • Removal of nuclear materials underway
- 8. Recent achievements • The following video covers 2016/17 • Insert 2016 / 17 video
- 9. Strategic challenges • Technical developments? • Maintaining workforce • Maintaining focus
- 10. Workforce • Dounreay remains the largest employer locally – Direct employees and supply chain • Workforce – Age profile with limited local population – Needs to grow to deliver the programme • Perception of opportunity – Definitive closure contract but long timescale
- 11. Workforce initiatives • Apprenticeships – Traditional – Modern • Graduate recruitment – Technical – Business and commercial • Equality, Diversity and Inclusion • Include Emma video
- 12. Challenges • Supply chain support the demand? • Local infrastructure requirements – Logistical challenges – Accommodation • Diversification pressures – Same infrastructure – Local workforce expectations
- 13. Maintaining focus • Long term programme – Delivery of benefits for customer – Aligned to customer’s strategic mission • Short term projects – Output focussed – Enabling delivery of programme outcome
- 14. Benefits realisation Customer Strategic Mission •Programme Benefits Contract Requirements •Programme Outcomes •Contract Specification Indicators •Themed Sub-programme Outcomes Measures •Generic Performance Metrics Detail •Project Specific Deliverables •Project Outputs •Scope statements •Statements of Requirements •Completion objectives Programme Management Focus Project Management Focus
- 15. Summary • Challenges are really the same as mid-1950s – Focus on longer term objectives – Deliver short term projects – Available labour pool – Infrastructure • Ongoing career development opportunities – Maintain workforce – Appropriate transferable skills
Editor's Notes
- Good morning / afternoon Thank you for extending the opportunity for me to present my personal reflections of working at Dounreay I will discuss the strategic challenges that arise as an industrial closure programme moves towards completion including the challenge of attracting, developing and retaining people to the end of the work and that of ensuring that project outputs align with the desired benefits of the programme. Firstly, let me introduce myself: I moved to Dounreay in 1996 after 8 years at Sellafield; in the years since, I have filled a range of roles with Project, Operations, Programme and Commercial Management responsibilities. Those project roles have included what I will call hard projects (ie those with deliverable outputs) and soft projects (ie organisational change projects with less tangible outputs). To understand the challenges that lie ahead of us in delivering the decommissioning of Dounreay, I need to explain some of the context. I will do that by introducing you to Dounreay. (Change slide.)
- Dounreay covers about 140 acres of coastal land in Caithness located on the Atlantic North Coast of the Scottish Mainland. It is on the flatter lands north of the traditional view of the Scottish Highlands; Nothing lies to the west between Caithness and North Sutherland and New Foundland and nothing to the east, bar a few oil and gas platforms, to Scandanavia. There are historic and ancient links between Caithnesss and Orkney and Scandanavia; not surprisingly there are a long list of “the most northerly” this-that-and-the-others! On the site there are three nuclear reactors, facilities for both fabricating new nuclear fuel and reprocessing used nuclear fuels. In addition, we have facilities for treating, storing and disposing of the various categories of radioactive wastes. I’ll provide some further information on some of these as we move through this presentation. Let me first though give you some idea of the history of the site, the legacy of which we are now managing. (Change slide)
- This is an aerial image of the Dounreay site. The site was chosen in 1954 to be the UK centre of fast reactor research. It was originally built in the 1940s for the RNAS as an airfield although was never fully operational. Dounreay was chosen from a list of others as it met the requirements of being in a remote and sparsely populated area at a time when much less was known about the safe operation of nuclear plants than today. It also met the technical requirements for good supplies of both fresh and sea water and having a solid bedrock. The nearby town of Thurso would provide a source labour and a basis for the infrastructure which would be needed for the construction of the site. Thurso at the time was a relatively small fishing port with a small population. The 1951 census recorded a population of about 3000, in 1971, this had grown to 9000, in 2011 the population was recorded as about 8000; UKAEA, which developed the site had to consider and provide not only the site infrastructure but also that needed to support this growing workforce. What is interesting in the context of this presentation is the parallels that exist nowadays. By 1958 the Dounreay Material Test Reactor had been built and achieved criticality, the first reactor to do so in Scotland. The next thirty or so years saw the construction of the two Fast or Fast Breeder Reactors. Fast as, unlike the other reactor systems used in the UK, the neutrons released from the nuclear reactions did not need to be slowed down to initiate the next reaction in the chain, breeder as spare neutrons are used to create new fissionable material from nuclear material positioned around the reactor core. In addition to the reactors, facilities were built to both fabricate and reprocess (effectively recycling) nuclear fuels both for use on the site and for commercial contracts. As the site reached its development objectives and global energy markets changed the decision was taken for the UK to end its development of Fast Reactor technologies. Therefore, in 1994 the final operational reactor – PFR – was shut down. Fuel reprocessing was ended in 1996; this left some used fuel from the reactors for us now to manage. Fuel fabrication ended in 2004 and the full site moved into decommissioning. The 2004 Energy Act initiated a new era; in 2005 the Site ownership transferred to NDA, DSRL was formed as the Site Licence Company. UKAEA remained as owner of DSRL (PBO) and following a commercial competition, a new PBO was appointed in 2012. On the image, there are three other notable facilities – the shaft and silo and the LLW facilities. The shaft and silo are historic, licenced waste facilities for higher activity wastes from which we are tasked to recover the waste and repackage it for long term passive storage in new above ground stores. The new LLW facilities have been developed to provide Dounreay with facilities for the disposal of its low level radioactive wastes; at present, we have two vaults and expecting to build further vaults as the programme progresses. I will now show you an introductory video to Dounreay which shows you the things we are currently focussed on. (Change slide / play video).
- Play video That gives you a flavour of what we have to do at present. It will help now to understand our objective; I will therefore tell you something about the programme. (Change slide.)
- Decommissioning can mean many things to many people, so for clarity I will explain the contract and the programme. The contract Dounreay has is to deliver the site to a state known as “the interim end state”. That is characterised (in the broadest sense) by all buildings except the long term waste stores demolished, the radioactive wastes (depending upon the classification) will either be in a disposal facility or in long term storage. And nuclear materials will be removed from the site. The programme is scheduled to be complete during the early 2030s to a target cost on around £2.25bn. To deliver this we have to design and build facilities to retrieve the wastes from the historic waste disposal facilities, facilities to clean and dismantle both reactors, we have to remove support buildings and ensure that the ground meets the regulatory requirements. In addition to these physical challenges, we have a range of technical solutions to develop. All of that sounds like we have a lot of work ahead of us – and we do but we’ve also done a lot. (Change slide)
- Already we have demolished more than one hundred buildings; whilst it is true to say that many of these have been simple non-nuclear buildings, we have also removed some significantly contaminated buildings – including fuel fabrication facilities and one building where criticality experiments were carried out and which when that work was completed, the scientists closed the doors, walked away and effectively said no-one will ever go back in there! Now all the remains is a floor slab which has been characterised and is clean. That building – and the apocryphal tale – sums up many of the technical issues we face; out simply, future decommissioning was never really considered during design and operational phases of nuclear plants. I’m happy to say since the 1990’s, the regulators will not grant permission to construct without an initial and credible decommissioning plan being in place. The two big reactors both used liquid alkali metals as coolants – either liquid sodium or sodium / potassium alloy; both materials react very energetically with water or the moisture in air. We had over 1500 tonnes of such material to dispose of; the bulk of that was finally completed last year. We have constructed two waste vaults to take some of our low level radioactive wastes; we plan to build further vaults in the near future although we are working hard to divert as much material as we can back into commercially available recycling streams rather than having to dispose of them in our vaults. Waste has been consigned to the vaults and we are working to clear a backlog of waste built up prior to the construction of the vaults as well as the ongoing waste being generated now. As you may have also seen in the media, we have been working for the past two years at packaging and removing nuclear materials from the Dounreay site. Once completed, this will allow us to ease some of the security requirements on the site, making it easier for us to bring contractors onto the site to carry out work on our programme. Its quite difficult sometimes to describe our achievements. We produced a video of our achievements in 2016/17 which I will now show you; unfortunately we are a little bit to early for our 2017/18 video to be available. (Change slide).
- Play video. That gives you a small insight into the work we have carried out recently; what of the challenges ahead? (Change slide)
- There are obviously technical challenges and it would be churlish of me to say there weren’t but are they the most significant? I would argue not; I do not believe that there are any technical issues that we cannot resolve – although there is a question of how quickly and at what cost can we resolve them; on a target cost contract with a long stop date, they are relevant questions. For me the two biggest strategic challenges remain, maintaining access to an appropriately skilled and motivated workforce and ensuring that what we do on the projects is aligned with the longer term project objectives. Lets park the technical developments for now – after-all this is a project management conference not an engineering one - and look at the other challenges and what we can do to address them. (Change slide)
- The Dounreay workforce is absolutely critical to the delivering the programme. Dounreay’s workforce has grown and shrunk over the years. In the 1990s there were approximately 1100 people on the site; today there are nearly 2000 people working on the Dounreay site – split between direct employees and those from the supply chain. Dounreay is still the largest single employer in Caithness although the economy is showing a greater diversity than it did a decade or so ago; this reflects the work that the Caithness and North Sutherland Regeneration Partnership to drive this diversification. The challenge we face is to attract, develop and retain a suitably qualified, experienced and motivated workforce to the end of the work programme. Dounreay has a workforce who’s age profile is skewed towards the mid-40s and 50s. Which means if we do nothing, we will not have a workforce to deliver the programme. There are schedule risks and we wish both to mitigate these and seek opportunities to accelerate the programme ahead of the current IES date. To do this and deliver the significant construction activities we will need to increase the number of people on the site – both direct and indirect emplyees. The perception many people have is that, as Dounreay is decommissioning, there are few long term career prospects or development opportunities. That of course is not an accurate one when we have more than a decade of the programme ahead of us. Few employers can say with such certainty that they have work that far ahead. To meet this need we are enhancing our resource management forecasting, looking to develop clearer a view of the skill sets and resource types/ Our programme has always been resource loaded but as we move forward, the definition within the resource codes needs to be increased. We have recently extended our plans for recruitment of graduates and apprentices to underpin the technical skills we need in the future; we have also recently started to implementing APM’s Competency Framework as a method to assess and drive our Project Management competencies. In my own area, I am moving towards using the same frameworks for our Project Controls community.
- Include Apprentice Video – Emma Apprenticeships for over 60 years Numbers this year? Total? Graduate recruitment – how many?
- Construction aspects of the programme are quite compressed Good – focus, efficiency of supply etc Not so good – high labour force requirements, can material requirements all be met at the same time, likelihood of significant travelling population, accommodation availability will be tested Continue to drive diversification of the local economy away from Dounreay placing requirements on the same infrastructure and meeting the expectations of the local population for long term sustainable employment