IAEA guidance, Environmental Agency laws, EU decrees, Nuclear Regulator recommended good practice, site licence requirements, Industrial Laws, etc., the many different regulatory schemes have ramifications in our industry. Legislative requirements are vital and impacting all things on a nuclear site, from comissioning to daily operations, the way a nuclear facility works but also how it is designed and how workers should undertake their daily activities.

As an example, in 2015, there were 40,000 legal acts in the EU, 15,000 court verdicts and 62,000 international standards, without including the regular amendments and updates.

Even though all these acts do not necessarily impact nuclear facilities, monitoring those new laws and amendments is time-consuming (still done manually) and cannibalises the time engineers have to focus on the impact, the “so what?”. Furthermore, when an update has been identified, there is still a tremendous amount of work required. Engineers must identify which site guidance and manuals are impacted by each new regulatory amendment, update internal manuals/ practices accordingly, and cascade out to the workforce on site(s) to ensure compliance.

To radically cut down on the time spent on regulatory monitoring and analysis, there is now a solution fit for an industrial sector as complex as nuclear. Here, a bespoke Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution can help accelerate legislation compliance. So far, it has been developed to help accelerate and enhance the analysis of decommissioning management requirements at Sellafield Ltd, but has the potential in the future to scale across the organisation to help accelerate the analysis of all relevant legislation and guidance.