The nuclear legacy that remains in the United Kingdom (UK) is complex and diverse. Consisting of legacy ponds and silos, redundant reprocessing plants, research facilities, and non-standard or one-off reactor designs, the clean-up of this legacy is under the stewardship of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). Through a mix of prompt and delayed decommissioning strategies, the NDA has made great strides in dealing with the UK’s nuclear legacy. Fuel debris and sludge removal from the legacy ponds and silos situated at Sellafield, as part of a prompt decommissioning strategy for the site, has enabled intolerable risks to be brought under control. Reactor defueling and waste retrievals across the Magnox fleet is enabling their transition to a period of care and maintenance; accelerated through the adopted ‘Lead and Learn’ approach. Bespoke decommissioning methods implemented by the NDA have also enabled the relevant site licence companies to tackle non-standard reactor designs and one-off wastes. Such approaches have potential to influence and shape nuclear decommissioning decision making activities globally, including in Korea.
The challenges facing companies and institutions surrounding civil nuclear decommissioning are diverse and many, none more so than those faced in the United Kingdom. The UK’s Generation I nuclear power plants and early research facilities have left a ‘Nuclear Legacy’ which is in urgent need of management and clean-up. Sellafield is quite possibly the most illfamed nuclear site in the UK. This complex and challenging site houses much of what is left from the early days of nuclear research in the UK, including early nuclear reactors (Windscale Piles, Calder Hall, and the Windscale Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor) and the UK’s early nuclear weapons programme. Such a legacy now requires careful management and planning to safely deal with it. This task falls on the shoulders of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). Through a mix of prompt and delayed decommissioning strategies, key developments in R&D, and the implementation of site licenced companies to enact decommissioning activities, the NDA aims to safety, and in a timely manner, deal with the UK’s nuclear legacy. Such approaches have the potential to influence and shape other such approaches to nuclear decommissioning activities globally, including in Korea.
Because the difference between products and services are getting less and less, service and manufacturing companies’ efforts are increasingly focused on utilizing services to satisfy customers’ needs under today’s competitive market environment. The value of services depends on service reliability that is identified by satisfaction derived from the relationship between customer needs and service providers. In this paper, we extend concepts from the fault tree analysis for reliability analysis of tangible systems to services. We use an event-based process model to facilitate service design and represent the relationships between functions and failures in a service. The objective of this research is to propose a method for evaluating service reliability based on service processes using service blueprint and FTA. We can identify the failure mode of service in a service delivery process with a service blueprint. The fuzzy membership function is used to characterize the probability of failure based on linguistic terms. FTA is employed to estimate the reliability of service delivery processes with risk factors that are represented as potential failure causes. To demonstrate implementation of the proposed method, we use a case study involving a typical automotive service operation.