OREANDA-NEWS. June 2006 the Commission of the European Communities and Smolensk NPP signed an On-Site Support Agreement envisaging a three-year TACIS project for nuclear safety enhancement. “Smolensky Atom” daily regularly informs its readers about TACIS projects at Smolensk NPP. Today, we would like to present the project “Safety Culture Enhancement at SNPP”, reported the press-centre of Smolensk NPP.

Surveys have shown that the key source of incidents at Smolensk NPP is “human factor”: negligence of rules, insufficient safeguarding, mistakes. That’s why it is very important to enhance safety culture at the plant. Some safety measures are aimed at improving production, others at solving scientific and medical problems; the key target of safety culture is a human being — an individual at work. Safety culture means sense of safety: a sense each person related to nuclear power engineering should have, a sense that will prevent him from doing anything contrary to safety rules. “Safety culture is when you observe rules even when nobody sees you.”    

Smolensk NPP has been working in this direction for many years already. The key goal of this project is to make constant safety culture enhancement a norm. The plant has already formed and trained task groups and has carried out benchmarking.

Benchmarking is a step towards own safety culture standard at the plant. It means searching among the best safety culture practices and developing own one. Our specialists have paid benchmarking visits to TVONS (Finland) and British Energy (UK).

Three levels of self-assessment

With the consultative support of foreign partners, our safety culture task group has worked out a self-assessment model based on the corporate culture model of Edgar Shein, an expert in organizational psychology and management. For NPPs corporate culture is, first of all, safety culture, and IAEA actively applies Shein’s model for enhancing safety culture at NPPs worldwide. Our specialists have also decided to apply it as a model of self-assessment.

Schein divides safety culture into three levels. The first - top - level is visible processes - artifacts - that can be observed, i.e. you can watch an employee and see if he observes safety rules while at work. The second level is espoused values: processes that lie deeper than artifacts and can be revealed through surveys, i.e. you ask an employee and he says that he observes safety rules while at work. Artifacts and espoused values do not always coincide: an employee may say that he observes rules but observations may prove otherwise. Comparison of the first two levels exposes the lower level – basic underlying assumptions: something deep inside human consciousness or corporate culture. Basic underlying assumptions answer the following question: Why an employee says that safety rules must be observed but fails to always observe them? Perhaps, he does not agree with the rules? Basic underlying assumptions expose the strong and weak points of safety culture. 

Self-assessment methods

The next stage after modeling is methodology. For analyzing the artifact level of safety culture Smolensk NPP applies the mechanisms used by WANO experts during their partner inspections. This autumn WANO experts will come here for inspecting the plant’s activities, particularly, its safety culture system. Our safety culture experts are going to use this partner inspection for artifact-level self-assessment. For this purpose, they will join their partners in collecting artifacts.

A survey based on IAEA safety culture criteria will reveal espoused values. During one of the past seminars foreign experts Petri Koistinen and Paul Richardson presented a sample questionnaire for the survey, its criteria and principles and data analysis methods. “Our goal for now is to coordinate and test the questionnaire,” says one of the local experts A.Bogens. “After the inspection and the survey we will compare the collected artifacts and espoused values so as to reveal the basic underlying assumptions,” says the head of the task group A.Chukharev. “This stage is crucial as effective analysis of basic underlying assumptions will help us to work out effective mechanisms for enhancing safety culture. Our goal is to reveal the causes rather than the consequences. This is a very hard job. It requires deep analysis and creativity. But we must do it if we really want to enhance our safety culture,“ says Chukharev.

The above model and methods were discussed at a seminar on June18 by foreign partners from British AMEC NNC Paul Richardson, John Dynan and Daniel Barker and Petri Koistinen from Finnish TVONS and the head of Rosenergoatom’s International Department O.Sarayev, members of the Safety Culture task group A.Chukharev, A.Bogens, A.Kirilenko and A.Tokarev and the head of the Department For Management of Human Resources of Obninisk Manager Training Institute M.Kandalova.

During a meeting with the director of Smolensk NPP A.Petrov the foreign partners said that the model was very good - in fact, the best for the needs of Smolensk NPP. As soon as the model is tested, they are going to make a detailed report on it so as other Rosenergoatom NPPs and other power companies can use this experience in their work. Special attention was given to the necessity of support by the plant’s management as this is one of the key factors of the project’s success.

The deputy chief engineer for technical support and quality A.Parshin said: “We have gone 1/3 of the way. It was the easiest but also the most important part as the quality of our self-assessment project depends on how well-trained our personnel are and how effectively they have used the information they have received from our British and Finnish partners. The next stage is decisive: the future of our project will depend on the efficiency of the self-assessment.” Petrov said: “We hope that this stage will be successful and will show us all our deficiencies and prompt us ways to improve them. We welcome this project and provide it with all-out support.”

The Russian experts from Obninsk Manager Training Institute also gave lectures during the last meetings. They told the plant’s instructors and operators about the basic principles of safety culture. The head of the Department for Management of Human Resources M.Kandalova told us about the objective of the seminar: “We summarized the experience of Russian and foreign companies. Since our audience is mostly people who know safety culture well, we spoke mainly about the practical aspect, about how to put theory into practice. The key topics were the concept of safety culture, how to organize information flow so as to enhance the personnel’s awareness of the importance of safety culture, risk management, analysis of achievements and mistakes.

We tried to show what cause mistakes but also that very often mistakes occur due to poor safety culture. In fact, the seminar was supposed to systematize our knowledge of what safety culture is.”

Parshin said that the seminar was an excellent opportunity for exchange of views and final analysis of the concept of safety culture. The greater part of the audience said that the seminar was very interesting and useful and that the information they received during the seminar would help them in their work.

The foreign experts conducted a seminar on strategy of communication. This is a general practice among foreign companies: in order to successfully implement a project, you need to provide all participants and partners with detailed information about it. Our experts agreed that strategy of communication is important and asked their foreign partners to provide them with detailed information and examples so they could work out their own strategy. The British experts agreed to provide the materials. The sides decided to meet once again to discuss this project.