A fleet that no longer looked like itself
Every asset eventually outlives the plan written for it.
Rules written for a stable estate get harder to apply as the estate changes underneath them. At some point the honest answer stops being “do it the way we did it last time”.
Every UK nuclear station must periodically review all of its significant safety cases against current standards and state, with evidence, whether it can safely operate for another ten years. It is the discipline set out in IAEA SSG-25, and a single station’s review runs four years or more.
By the fourth cycle the AGR fleet had stopped being one thing. Some stations were entering defuelling. Others were still generating. The same regulatory obligation now met plant in materially different states, and the previous cycle’s approach could not simply be repeated.
Forward Projects has been embedded with EDF Energy Nuclear Generation in a senior programme management role since 2017 — first the £23M PSR3 programme, then the £6M essential defuelling safety case programme for Hinkley Point B and Hunterston B, and now PSR4 across the fleet. We led the programme team that developed the new fleet-wide strategy; the submission itself was made to the Office for Nuclear Regulation by EDF.
The work behind it: business cases to approval boards, through-life planning, negotiation with internal group heads for scarce specialist resource, external contracting, commercial strategy, financial planning, risk management, and monthly reporting built for people who need the position in five minutes, not fifty.
The saving came from refusing to start from scratch. Work already delivered by sister programmes could be exploited rather than repeated. The PSR4 proposal carries an estimated £10M saving against baseline – public money, not returned to a shareholder.
The expensive assumption is usually that this time is unprecedented. Often most of the answer already exists somewhere in the organisation.
Discuss a project like this