Operation and maintenance of the SAFARI-1 research reactor: Challenges and opportunities in long term operation of research reactors

Since its commissioning in March 1965, the SAFARI-1 research reactor has achieved many outstanding successes and post 1995, has become one of the most highly utilised nuclear research reactors in the world, with respect to safe and reliable operation and the aim to serve all stakeholders for more than 20 years at ~300 operational days. This gave SAFARI-1 the opportunity to becomes one of South Africa's and Necsa's cornerstone facilities, especially during the mid 1990's with the changing political environment where SAFARI-1's main application was to be a cost sustainable facility to operate as a commercial production facility of radioisotopes and rendering of irradiation services to various stakeholders. During this period, SAFARI-1 had moved from a way from a low utilised, Monday to Friday research oriented programme, to a highly utilised production facility with little R&D and beam line activities. This is high level of utilisation is evident when looking at the operational hours, in which the first 1 Million Mega Watt hours (1000GWh) was reach in 1995 (30 years from first start-up), followed by reaching the 2 million MWh mark 8.8 years later in 2003. This trend continued and the 3 Million MWh (3000GWh) mark was reached in 2011, and only recently has SAFARI-1 broke through the 4 Million MWh (4000GWh) mile stone. This vast increase in utilisation has accordingly brought various challenges and opportunities with a special qualified and skilled workforce to support the operational programme in all disciplines of engineering, nuclear technology, maintenance, operations, radiation protection, regulatory and licensing, conventional and nuclear safety, quality and environment aspects, waste management as well as security. The last 54 years and especially the 21 years since 1996 where the operational programme required a higher than normal utilization of SAFARI-1, mainly due to the commercial purposes, SAFARI-1 and operational staff had also to withstand apart from the above-mentioned challenges, many other life cycle factors or challenges. These challenges and life cycle factors are related to the ever changing political strategies, regulatory environment, organisational changes, strategic focus or objectives, facility ageing factors, human capacity and skills development, work force factors, operational challenges, technology application, design information and developments and lastly but not limited to the reactor facility operational safety culture related to the management approach followed. The main objective, having it challenges, is for SAFARI-1 to be a sustainable operational irradiation facility until at least 2030 or longer, pending on continuous engineering assessments supported by an ageing management programme, In-Service Inspections, effective maintenance, operational constrains as well as regulatory conditions. (author)