The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority

Last Updated: 02 December 2011

Securing efficient and effective management of assets is a duty placed on the NDA through the Energy Act 2004 as owner of the assets. UK Treasury published expectations for the management of assets through their "Managing Public Money" advice document. The SLC's are bound to operate the facilities under their control to an agreed standard of public and employee safety, security and environmental protection. The NDA has contracts with the SLCs to meet these requirements through management of the assets. The effective and efficient management of assets across the NDA estate is critical to delivery of the Decommissioning and Clean Up mission. Utilising and demonstrating industry good practice in asset management is essential to provide confidence to the NDA and key stakeholders that risks are being managed, and value for money is being achieved. Implementing a consistent approach across the estate aligns with industry good practice and allows the NDA to work efficiently in assuring programme delivery.

 Asset Management Strategy March 2011 (3Mb)

Objective

Secure reliable NDA asset performance in order to enable safe and effective delivery of the Decommissioning and Clean Up mission.

Scope and Boundaries

This strategy covers all physical assets owned by the NDA with the exception of nuclear materials. The strategy scope is to implement asset management good industry practice across the NDA (NDA and SLCs) estate and hence secure reliable asset performance and to embed and sustain this into the future.

Interfaces

As a critical enabler the Asset Management Strategy interfaces at implementation level with all the other Topic Strategies.  In particular it has a strong interface with the following:

• Decommissioning strategy is related because it could affect plans and programmes.
• Business optimisation topics are related because it can affect plant/facility and infrastructure performance.

Credible Options

The strategic options relating to asset management are:

1. Maintain the current position, whereby the NDA, its subsidiaries and contractors apply individual approaches to asset management

2. Develop NDA asset management standards from scratch

3. Adopt a recognised asset management standard such as the Publicly Available Specification PAS-55

Option 3 is preferred as the most credible and cost effective solution. Having selected PAS-55 as the industry good practice standard for asset management, implementation is proceeding by:

• Identifying and improving asset management assessed against PAS-55
• Using a risk based approach to identifying assets critical to NDA mission and implementing costs effective and fit for purpose improvements where required

Current Position

Despite the lack of a commonly applied standard for asset management across the NDA estate, the SLCs are currently managing their assets within inherited regimes whist responding to NDA's call to change.

The preferred strategic option is mature because similar strategies have been implemented by other organisations and the requirements to successfully manage such strategies have been benchmarked and are well understood.

The programme of work behind the strategy is well developed and already well into implementation in conjunction with the SLCs and regulators. However there are a large number of unknowns at this time due to a number of factors such as asset management maturity and asset risk. This presents some significant challenges to successfully implementing the change and makes predicting the magnitude of effort required to make the necessary changes difficult. However, plans are in place to deal with the issues identified through benchmarking SLC performance.

The primary risks are:

• potential for critical asset failure due to asset condition
• uncertain cost impact due to unrevealed asset condition and hence affordability within current funding constraints.