Nuclear Safety

For many years, as a direct result of international governmental concern, the nuclear power industry has been at the forefront of industrial safety. This text represents a cross-disciplinary look at the human factors developments in this industry, with wider applications for the entire industrial sector. Technical, psychological and social aspects of industrial safety come under the scrutiny of scientists and engineers from an array of different backgrounds. The contributors are international safety scientists from the USA, Japan and Europe, and their chapters deal with a variety of issues: from theoretical aspects of applicable cultural models, to reviews of actual safety performance in specific plants.

Jyuyi Misumi, Rainer Miller and Bernhard Wilpert

Preface, Introduction, Part One. Nuclear power operations and their environment: culture and inter-organisational relations, 1. The social construction of safety, 2. Constructing organisational reliability: the problem of embeddedness and duality, 3. Finnish and Swedish practices in nuclear safety, 4. The cultural context of nuclear safety culture: a conceptual model and field study, 5. Implicit social norms in reactor control rooms, 6. Situational assessment of safety culture, 7. Advanced displays, cultural stereotypes and organisational characteristics of a control room, 8. From theory to practice - on the difficulties of improving human-factors learning from events in an inhospitable environment, 9. Inter-organisational development in the German nuclear safety system, Part Two. Nuclear power operations: organisational aspects, 10. Organisational factors and nuclear power plant safety, 11. Capturing the river: multilevel modelling of safety management, 12. The effects of leadership and group decision on accident prevention, 13. Are we casting the net too widely in our search for the factors contributing to errors and accidents?, Part Three. Group and individual performance, 14. Human performance indicators, 15. Predicting human error probabilities from the ability requirements of jobs in nuclear power plants, 16. Self-assessment and learning in nuclear power plant simulation training, 17. Knowledge acquisition through repeated theoretical and practical training, Part Four. Learning from experience, 18. An outline of human factors studies conducted by the Japanese electric power industry, 19. Human errors in Japanese nuclear power plants: a review of 25 years, 20. Human factors as revealed by the use of natural language in near-incidents at nuclear power plants, 21. Human factors in nuclear power plant maintenance - an empirical study, 22. A review of human error prevention activities at Kansai Electric's nuclear power stations, Index