Recent activities of the UK working party on criticality - 14334

The Working Party on Criticality (WPC) in the United Kingdom (UK) is the non-executive national committee that focuses on criticality safety issues up to, but not including, experimental and in-core power reactor operations. The current membership includes representatives from all relevant UK Site Licensee Companies and Regulators together with a small number of other key companies with interests in this area. In recent times, the primary focus of the committee has been to provide a forum for the discussion and distribution of information of relevance to criticality safety in the UK, particularly the sharing and development of good practice. However, it also serves as a useful forum to (i) disseminate regulatory issues of relevance to criticality safety and facilitate the development of a UK criticality community view on such matters, (ii) guide, promote, coordinate and encourage cooperation on high priority activities of common interest to the UK criticality community, (iii) promote international collaboration in the field of criticality safety, and (iv) provide opportunities for the professional development of criticality safety personnel. This paper gives a detailed overview of the activities of the WPC in the years since the last International Conference on Nuclear Criticality (ICNC), held at Edinburgh in 2011. It undoubtedly continued to be a challenging time for the UK criticality community, not least because of difficulties with the central coordination (and hence funding) of strategic issues in the UK as the nuclear industry has become increasingly fragmented. However, despite these issues, the committee has still been able to fulfil its objectives during that time and successfully supported the UK criticality community. A particular focus of the paper will be the success of the Continued Professional Development workshops and the potential benefits of other countries adopting a similar initiative. (author)