Nuclear

The nuclear industry has been, and continues to be, an important part of the UK’s low carbon energy generation. With the UK and other governments needing to build new state of the art nuclear facilities, as well as maintain active facilities and decommission aging facilities, there has never been more of a demand for safe, resilient and reliable control and automation systems.

Our Engineering Teams work hard to develop innovative solutions whilst meeting all relevant standards and our own internal ISO9001 procedures. The teams understand the importance of meeting the customers’ stringent requirements without compromising safety and reliability.

Fairfields have delivered many projects into the nuclear industry with solutions including:

Our engineers work closely with our client throughout a project from attending HAZOPS to carrying out Factory Acceptance Testing and the final Site Acceptance Testing (SAT) ensuring the systems meet specifications and expectations of the client when it comes to operation and maintenance.

Our TUV qualified Safety Engineers work closely with our clients in order to fully determine the solution they need and in turn, the requirements that will be placed on a safety system.

Safety Systems

Our TUV qualified Safety Engineers work closely with our clients in order to fully determine the solution they need and in turn, the requirements that will be placed on a safety system. The basis of any safety system must be the risk assessment around which the safety system is tailored. The safeguarding applied to any system usually involves the use of a type of control system, and the Machinery Directive details various requirements relating to the performance of such a system. In particular, it states:

“Control systems must be designed and constructed in such a way as to prevent hazardous situations from arising”.

The Machinery Directive does not specify the use of any particular standard, but the use of a control system meeting the requirements of harmonised standard(s) is one means of demonstrating compliance. The two such standards which form the core of our safety systems design are ISO 13849 and IEC 62061.

Experience

Fairfields have delivered projects for and into many nuclear facilities including:

Hinkley Point
Bradwell
Sellafield
Hunterston
Chaplecross
Capenhurst
HMNB Devonport

Many of the projects delivered by Fairfields into the Nuclear Industry have been centred around automated handling systems such as box transfer cranes. These automated handling cranes are supplied by one of the UKs leading suppliers of Bespoke Handling Systems, SCX Special Projects.