Friday, July 6, 2018

WANO Publicizes Projects That Promote Safety But Short-Changes Nuclear Safety Culture

NOT WANO's world headquarters
The World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) recently announced* the completion and delivery of 12 post-Fukushima projects intended to enhance safety in the world’s commercial nuclear power plants.  It appears the projects were accomplished by a combination of WANO and member personnel.  An addendum to the press release describes how WANO has revised its own practices to more effectively deliver its services in the 12 project areas to members.  The projects address emergency preparedness, emergency support plan, severe accident management, early event notification, onsite fuel storage, design safety fundamentals, peer review frequency and equivalency, corporate peer reviews, WANO assessment, transparency and visibility, and WANO internal assessment. 

Our Perspective

We usually don’t waste time with WANO because it has never developed or promoted any insight into the systemic interactions of the management and cultural variables that create ongoing nuclear organizational performance.  And the results they are touting are based on their familiar, inadequate worldview, viz. promoting more development for leaders and more detail to functional areas.

That said, we recognize that incremental improvements in the project areas might add some modest value and hopefully do not hurt performance.  (Performance may be “hurt” when personnel punctiliously and mindlessly follow policies, rules and procedures without considering if they are actually appropriate for the situation at hand.)

Most of WANO’s claims for improving its own services are typical chest-thumping but a few items perpetuate long-standing industry shortcomings, especially excessive secrecy.  For example, under design safety fundamentals WANO peer reviews assess whether safety-related design features are appropriately managed but “WANO does not make design-change recommendations or evaluate the design of the plant itself.”  WANO assessments of utility/plant performance are confidential to the subject CEOs.  And WANO’s concept of improving transparency means “effectively sharing information and best practices within the membership.”  Looks like WANO’s prime directive is to shield the dues-paying members from any hard questions or external criticism.

Our biggest gripe is WANO’s treatment, or lack thereof, of nuclear safety culture (NSC).  In the press release, culture is mentioned once: Mid-to-senior level “managers at nuclear power plants play a vital part in delivering excellence and a strong nuclear safety culture, due to their positional influence throughout the organisation.”  That’s true, but culture is much more pervasive, systemic and important than that.

We find it surreal that WANO has been busy organizing worldwide resources to polish the bowling ball** and then claim they have made the industry safer post-Fukushima.  Linking their putative progress to Fukushima ignores a fundamental truth: while weaknesses in various functional areas were causal factors that made a bad situation worse, the root cause of the Fukushima disaster was the deep-seated, value-driven unwillingness of people who knew to speak truth to power about the tsunami design inadequacies.  It was culture that killed the plant.


*  WANO press release, “WANO calls on industry to build on progress after post-Fukushima improvements” (June 26, 2018).  Retrieved July 5, 2018.

**  “polish a bowling ball” - A phrase we use to describe activities that make an existing construct shinier but have no impact on its fundamental nature or effectiveness.

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