FULL RANGE SAFETY PRODUCTS PLUS GUARD DESIGN AND INSTALLATION SERVICE
12 November 2004 - EJA

British Energy, one of the UK's largest electricity companies, has around 20% of the generation market. The company owns and operates eight nuclear power stations in the UK with a combined capacity of approximately 9600 MW. Seven stations have twinned advanced gas cooled reactors; the eighth, a pressurised water reactor.

In 2002/03 the industrial safety accident rate for British Energy's Nuclear stations was one of the lowest ever at 0.48 accidents per 200,000 hours worked. However, despite this performance the company is devoting large resources in its efforts to achieve an injury free workplace.

Recently, the focus of these resources has been the Hunterston and Torness power stations in Scotland. Due to the specialised nature of their operation, these stations have their own workshops complete with machine tools to perform specific machining and general maintenance tasks. The Engineering Team Leader at Hunterston is Willie Welsh. He is responsible for the general operation and operator safety of 25 machines, lathes, presses and drilling machines. In late 2003, Mr Welsh conducted a revised safety evaluation of the machines, which highlighted certain issues that he immediately flagged up to British Energy management. This resulted in investment being made available to upgrade all machine stock at the Hunterston Station.

The supplier chosen to undertake the safety upgrade was AB-Guardmaster. 'They were able to provide the best solution to our requirements with a comprehensive safety package that included a wide range of different equipment types and the manufacture and fitment of movable guards,' said Willie Welsh. 'We also got good advice and good service, nothing was a problem.'

Engineers from AB-Guardmaster fitted the machines with equipment such as Nelsa's Torklok: a dc injection braking system that provides operator safeguarding on machines, which in critical situations would otherwise not stop quickly enough to prevent serious injury. The Torklok braking unit is designed for machinery such as radial and multispindle drills, horizontal borers and lathes, which is difficult to guard conventionally. In these cases the only way to ensure sufficient operator protection is to provide a way of stopping the machine quickly if the operator gets into difficulties.

The dc injection braking provided by Torklok is the best and most reliable way of achieving this, the system providing a typical stopping time within one second when fitted to a radial drill.

Also fitted to many of the machines is AB-Guardmaster's Safedge, pressure sensitive safety device. The Safedge strip is mounted right along the front of lathes used in the Hunterston workshop to prevent the risk of entanglement as a result of operators leaning over into the machine. The action of leaning compresses the sensitive Safedge material, an action that energises the Torklok system to stop the machine in less than one second.

Engineers from AB Guardmaster also designed and installed movable guards on the chucks of the machine tools at Hunterston, and supplied and fitted all safety interlock and emergency stop switches. The result of all this work is described by Willie Welsh 'as the safest systems he has seen in 30 years of engineering.'

The success of the project at Hunterston has resulted in AB-Guardmaster providing a similar safety retrofit at Torness, another of British Energy's Scottish nuclear facilities. The Torness project employed the same types of equipment and guarding systems as Hunterston, but was almost twice as large, with a total of 47 machines involved.

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  • For November 2004
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