Friday, October 2, 2015

Training Materials for Teaching NRC Personnel about Safety Culture

This is a companion piece to our Aug. 24, 2015 post on how the NRC effectively regulates licensee safety culture (SC) in the absence of any formal SC regulations.  This post summarizes a set of NRC slides* for training inspectors on SC basics and how to integrate SC information and observations into inspection reports.

The slides begin with an overview of SC, material you’ve seen countless times.  It includes the Chernobyl and Davis-Besse events, the Schein tri-level model and a timeline of SC-related activities at the NRC.

The bulk of the presentation shows how SC is related to and incorporated in the Reactor Oversight Process (ROP).  The starting point is the NRC SC Policy Statement, followed by the Common Language Initiative** which defined 10 SC traits.  The traits are connected to the ROP using 23 SC aspects.  Aspects are “the important characteristics of safety culture which are observable to the NRC staff during inspection and assessment of licensee performance” (p. 13)  Each SC aspect is associated with one of the ROP’s 3 cross-cutting areas: Human Performance (14 aspects), Problem Identification and Resolution (6 aspects) and Safety Conscious Work Environment (3 aspects).  During supplemental and reactive inspections there are an additional 12 SC aspects to be considered.  Each aspect has associated artifacts that indicate the aspect’s presence or absence.  SC aspects can contribute to a cross-cutting theme or, in more serious cases, a substantive cross-cutting issue (SCCI).***

The integration of SC findings into inspection reports is covered in NRC Inspection Manual Chapter 0612 and NINE different NRC Inspection Procedures (IPs). (p. 30)  In practice, the logic chain between a SC aspect and an inspection report is the reverse of the description in the preceding paragraph.  The creation of an inspection report starts with a finding followed by a search for a related SC cross-cutting aspect.  Each finding has one most significant cause and the inspectors should “find the aspect that describes licensee performance that would have prevented or precluded the performance deficiency represented by that cause.” (p. 33)

Our Perspective

This is important stuff.  When NRC inspectors are huddled in their bunker evaluating their data and observations after reviewing your documentation, crawling around your plant and talking with your people, the information in these slides provides the road map for their determination of how one or more alleged SC deficiencies contributed to a performance problem which resulted in an inspection finding.

Think of the SC aspects as pegs on which the inspectors can hang their observations to beef up their theory of why a problem occurred. Under routine conditions, there are 23 pegs; under more stringent inspections, there are 35 pegs.  That’s a lot of pegs and none of them is trivial which means your organization’s response may consume sizable resources.

We’ll finish with a more cheery thought:  If you get to the point where the NRC is going to conduct an independent assessment of your SC, their team will follow the guidance in IP 95003.  But don’t worry about their competence, “IP 95003 inspection teams will receive "just-in-time" training before performing the inspection.” (p. 43)

Bottom line: If it looks like controlling oversight behavior and quacks like a bureaucrat, then it probably is de facto regulation.


*  NRC Training Slides, “Safety Culture Reactor Oversight Process Training” (July 10, 2015).  ADAMS ML15191A253.  The slides include other material, e.g., a summary of the conditions under which the NRC can “request” a licensee to perform a SC assessment, a set of case studies and sample test questions for trainees.

**  The Common Language Initiative led to NUREG-2165, “Safety Culture Common Language” which was published in early 2014 and we reviewed on April 6, 2014.

***  There are some complicated decision rules for determining when a problem is a substantive cross-cutting issue and these are worth reviewing on pp. 27-28.

1 comment:


  1. If you can get people to talk about safety culture you have succeeded in getting the conversation away from compliance.

    ReplyDelete

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