Safety, Security And Safeguards Working Together In A Modernised Generic Design Assessment

Drawing on our current work within international fora, the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) has, based on learning from experience, started to examine the benefits and challenges of taking a more holistic approach when assessing proposed nuclear facilities. Furthermore, in encouraging innovation through our goal setting regulatory regime, ONR seeks a better appreciation of the potential opportunities and risks offered by more novel nuclear power plant designs. Culminating in early 2022, ONR and the Environment Agency completed the Generic Design Assessment of the UKHPR 1000 reactor design. For the security assessment of that design, ONR applied their new regulatory approach based on their Security Assessment Principles so to better align security with safety. Although this initiative is only the beginning of seeking closer integration between security, safety and safeguards functions (commonly called the '3Ss'), it set the conditions for a more integrated approach to assessing risks inherent in a design and how these might be addressed adequately by a vendor or Requesting Party. Moreover, ONR's expectation is that, within any Generic Design Assessment, the security case draws from and informs a safety case. Likewise, the expectation is that a Requesting Party will adopt a secure by design approach that itself demands close cooperation between safety, security and safeguards specialisms. Therefore, building on our successful experience of safety and security working together, our future Generic Design Assessments will seek to integrate safeguards as an assessment discipline. As part of the paper, ONR will present developing ideas on organizational collaboration. ONR will also offer thinking on where interaction between the 3Ss would be mutually beneficial while acknowledging any limitations on this approach. Such limitations suggest our approach would need to be evolutionary and carefully considered. In this way ONR will be able to confidently guide and assess future Requesting Parties with the expectation that their final designs reflect the potential benefits that could be offered through the further integration of the 3Ss.