Office for Nuclear
Regulation

The clientanchor

The Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) is the safety regulator for the nuclear industry in the UK.

Their mission is to provide efficient and effective regulation of the nuclear industry, including logging historical and current nuclear material quantities, locations and movement.

The challengeanchor

Following the 2016 referendum and the UK decision to leave the European Union the UK government announced that the UK would establish a domestic nuclear safeguards regime designating ONR as the State Regulatory Authority. The ONR project to deliver this began in summer 2017, with a delivery date determined by the UK government decision to leave the EU by 29
March 2019, and a subsequent agreement on a transition period up to 31 December 2020 when Euratom provisions in the UK would cease.

Having been regulated by Euratom for nuclear safeguards since 1973, the UK didn’t have a comprehensive State System of Accounting for and Control of Nuclear Material (SSAC), prior to leaving Euratom. As a result, ONR needed to establish a nuclear material accountancy system to enable the upload, editing and creation of nuclear material accountancy reports required by the Nuclear Safeguards (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 (NSR19), but additionally, capable of translating those domestic reports into the format required by the UK/IAEA bilateral Voluntary Offer Agreement for submission to the IAEA by ONR on behalf of the UK.

The solutionanchor

In June 2018, Axistwelve along with its strategic partner NAC International were awarded the contract by the Office for Nuclear Regulation to provide a new State level MC&A software system called the Safeguards Information Management Reporting System (SIMRS). The SIMRS solution mimics the Euratom system in terms of the requirements and formatting of the MC&A data collected from the nuclear facilities in the UK, and includes algorithms to convert the information as necessary to meet IAEA reporting requirements. The imminent departure from the EU meant that the solution was delivered within a challenging deadline of only 6 months.