Nuclear Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

A safety case is an argument, not a collection of evidence. It says: this plant is adequately safe, and here is why you should believe it. Thousands of pages of analysis support that claim, and a regulator's assessment turns on whether the thread running through them holds together. Cases fail assessment not because the engineering is wrong but because the reader cannot find the argument inside the evidence.

We edit what nuclear engineers and safety case authors produce — safety cases and safety case summaries, claims, arguments and evidence structures, fault schedules and fault sequence analyses, deterministic safety analysis reports, probabilistic safety assessment documentation, ALARP demonstrations and options studies, safety functional requirements and categorisation documentation, periodic safety review documentation, modification and change safety justifications, operating rules and safety mechanism documentation, decommissioning and waste management safety cases, and regulatory submissions and responses to queries. Our editors work on the thread the assessor has to follow.

The claims, arguments and evidence structure is the spine of a nuclear safety case, and it fails through vagueness at the top and disconnection at the bottom. A claim asserting that the plant is safe is unassessable; a claim that the containment maintains integrity for the design basis earthquake with a stated margin can be argued about, which is the point. We work through these so each claim is specific enough to be falsifiable and is decomposed into sub-claims that together are sufficient rather than merely relevant; so each argument states plainly why the evidence beneath it establishes the claim above it, since the argument layer is the one most often reduced to a heading and it is the layer the assessor is actually assessing; so every piece of evidence is referenced to a controlled document at a stated issue, with what it demonstrates and what it does not; so assumptions and the conditions under which the case holds are collected and carried forward rather than distributed through chapters, because a case whose limits cannot be listed cannot be maintained; so the ALARP argument addresses what was considered and rejected with reasons, given that a demonstration listing only what was adopted reads as a description; and so counter-evidence and uncertainty are stated in the case rather than left for the assessor to raise. Cases written this way get assessed on the engineering.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including safety cases, analyses and regulatory correspondence. We are editors rather than nuclear or safety case specialists, and we offer no view on claims, analysis or adequacy. What we can do is make the argument findable inside the evidence.