A licensed site, or part of a licensed site, may be removed from the licensing requirements of the Nuclear Installations Act 1965 (NIA65). Licensees can apply to us to delicense all or part of a site and to end their period of responsibility for nuclear third-party liability for the site or that part of it.
Before we delicense, we need to be satisfied that that there has ceased to be any danger from ionising radiations from anything on the site or the part of the site in question. We assess whether applications for delicensing have met specific criteria in our guidance, after consulting the appropriate environment authority. Once satisfied, we will provide notice in writing to the licensee that the period of responsibility has been ended for all or part of the licensed site, and we will revoke the licence or vary it to exclude that part of the licensed site from the licence.
The Energy Act 2023 contains amendments to NIA65 that will provide regulators and licensees with additional flexibility on the criteria that need to be met before all or part of a site can be delicensed and the period of responsibility ended. The new criteria are based on international standards agreed under the Paris Convention on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy. When the legislative amendments are brought into force, this page will be updated with further information on the new criteria.
Example: Imperial College Reactor Centre
In April 2022 we formally revoked the nuclear site licence of the Imperial College Reactor Centre, which had been in place for more than 60 years. This decision followed many years of work to defuel and then decommission the site in Silwood Park, Ascot, after the shutdown of the Consort research reactor in 2012.
Read more about how the Imperial College Reactor Centre became the first reactor site in the UK to be fully decommissioned under modern regulatory controls.