Totally Nude, Naked Nuclear Safety Culture

I admit it.  The title is a cheap April Fools trick to draw new, perhaps less conventional, visitors to Safetymatters.  The only thing you’ll see here is the naked truth about nuclear safety culture (NSC), which we have been preaching about for years.

We’ve repeatedly listed the ingredients for a strong NSC: decision-making that recognizes goal conflicts and establishes clear, consistent safety priorities; an effective corrective action program; a mental model of organizational functioning that considers interrelationships and feedback loops among key variables; a compensation plan that rewards safety performance; and leadership that walks the talk on NSC.

We’ve also said that, absent constant maintenance, NSC will invariably decay over time because of complacency and system dynamics.  Complacency leads to hubris (“It can’t happen here”) and opens the door for the drift toward failure that occurs with normalization of deviance and group think.  System dynamics include constant environmental adaptations, goal conflicts, shifting priorities, management incentives tilted toward production and cost achievements, and changing levels of intra-organizational trust. 

NSC in practice appears to have approached an asymptote to the ideal.  Problems still occur; currently Entergy, TVA and AREVA are in the hot seat.  We have to ask: Is the industry’s steady-state NSC a low-intensity war of Whac-a-Mole?  You be the judge.