Nuclear Site Licence
A licence required under the Nuclear Installations Act 1965 for any site used for installing or operating a nuclear installation. Licences are granted by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) and may be subject to conditions on safety, security, and environmental protection. Operating without a licence is a criminal offence.
Independent editorial summary — not the official statute text. Read the official version on legislation.gov.uk.
Nuclear site licensing is a statutory regime under the Nuclear Installations Act 1965 (NIA65), and forms the core of ONR's control over the sector: a corporate body is granted a licence to use a site for specified purposes, covering facilities ranging from power stations and research reactors to fuel manufacturing, reprocessing plants and bulk radioactive matter storage.
The licence itself is a lifetime document for the site. The nuclear site licence is a legal document, issued for the full life cycle of the facility, containing site-specific information such as the licensee's address and location, and defining the installations permitted under it. It must clearly define the licensed site and the licensed installations, and have attached to it whatever conditions ONR considers necessary in the interests of safety.
In practice, every licence carries a standard package of conditions covering the whole operational life of the site. A set of 36 standard licence conditions (LCs), covering design, construction, operation and decommissioning, is attached to each licence, and NIA65 requires ONR to attach conditions that it considers necessary or desirable in the interests of safety to each nuclear site licence, with further conditions possible on the handling, treatment and disposal of nuclear matter.
Example
A company proposing to build a new small modular reactor must obtain a nuclear site licence from ONR before construction begins, and will remain bound by the standard 36 licence conditions through construction, operation and eventual decommissioning.
Related terms
Official sources
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