1. Safety & Security Culture 2nd Nuclear Regulatory Information Conference
Isabel Steyn
Necsa

2. Contents What does “culture” mean? What is Safety & Security Culture?
Where do we see culture – Behaviours?
What Safety & Security Culture is Not
Concepts of a Safety Culture
Safety Assurance
Safety Culture Programme
Conclusion

3. What is Safety & Security Culture?
Before we can define Safety and Security Culture, we must define culture.

4. What does “culture” mean?
…… from the Latin cultura, meaning "to cultivate”:
Wikipedia
Excellence of taste in the fine arts (known as ‘high culture”);
An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour that depends upon social learning;
The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterises an institution, organisation or group.
Oxford dictionary
The arts and manifestations of human intellectual achievement;
The ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular society;
The attitudes and behaviour characteristic of a particular social group.

5. What is Safety & Security Culture?
There are many definitions:
According to INSAG (1991):
That assembly of characteristics and attitudes in organisations and individuals which establishes that, as an overriding priority, nuclear plant safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance.

6. What is Safety & Security Culture?
According to the IAEA:
Safety Culture is the assembly or collection of characteristics and attitudes in organisations and individuals which establishes that, as an overriding priority, nuclear plant safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance.

7. What is Safety & Security Culture?
According to Schein:
Organisational Culture: “A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way you perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems."

8. What is Safety & Security Culture?
According to Guldenmund (2000):
Those aspects of the organisational culture which will impact on attitudes and behaviour related to increasing or decreasing risk.

9. What is Safety & Security Culture?
According to Mearns, et al (2003):
Safety culture … forms the environment within which individual safety attitude develop and persist and safety behaviours are promoted.

10. What is Safety & Security Culture?
Security Culture is:
The ideas, customs, and social behaviour of particular people or society. Using this definition, security culture may be defined as a culture that impact security in our organisation, both in a positive and a negative way.

11. What is Safety & Security Culture?
Security culture is:
The set of values, shared by everyone in an organisation, which determine how people are expected to think about; and approach security.

12. What is Safety & Security Culture?
With all these definitions, safety and security culture is simply:
“The way we do things around here".

13. Where do we see culture - Behaviours
Food queues in Japan after the tsunami

14. What Safety & Security Culture is Not
It’s not separate or different from organisational culture;
Not a “thing” with an objective existence;
It’s not a policy, program or procedure.

15. Concepts of a Safety Culture
A zero-incident safety culture is a concept whose time has come. It is both a challenge and an opportunity.
There are three stages in the development of a good safety culture.
Reactive: Workers react to safety incidents, instead of thinking about how to prevent them.
Independent: Once people view safety as having primary importance, they practice safety because they want to do it, not because they are being told to do it.
Interdependent: Every employee is looking out for others. It’s the “brother’s keeper” mentality.

16. Safety Assurance
We are here at a Nuclear Regulatory Information Conference
So what are the “ideas, customs, social behaviour”, and the “attitudes and behaviour characteristic” of a typical worker within the nuclear industry?
Who does the general public want to be designing, managing, operating and maintaining their nuclear power plants?
What will make the public feel safer and more comfortable with the concept of nuclear power?

17. Well-aware of the potential for disaster;
The Answer…
Creating and maintaining a Nuclear Safety & Security Culture that assures the public and the government that the people who work in the field are:
Well-aware of the potential for disaster;
Treat nuclear as SPECIAL – at all times;
Are professional, thorough and rigorous in their duties.

18. His standard... "I have a son. I love my son.
According to Rickover
He was characterised as being intolerant of mediocrity, outspoken, uncompromising on quality and totally dedicated to safety.
His standard... "I have a son. I love my son.
I want everything that I do to be so safe that I would be happy to have my son operating it.“

19. According to Rickover
Rickover’s safety solutions were simple: 1. Use highly trained personnel; 2. Design first rate equipment; 3. Design equipment to be easily repaired; 4. Build in redundancy for every thing important; 5. Make sure that contractors do not cut corners; 6. Make sure that all parts fulfil all specifications; 7. Don’t deviate from successful formulas; 8. Write manuals/instructions for everything, perfect them, and see to it that they are followed to the letter.

20. Safety Culture Programme
Focuses on all 3 levels of an organisation: - Leadership - Processes - Individual
The Individual level is really the last layer of defence.
This layer assumes that nothing is fool proof, and that risk remains regardless of how many reviews, sign-offs and approvals have been done.
This is when an individual’s safety & security culture comes to the fore.

21. Safety Culture Programme
Even the most uptight, rigid nuclear professional is human;
Humans will and shall ALWAYS make mistakes (some big, some small, some no-one will ever find out about, and some that simply cannot be hidden……
Fire

22. What can go wrong?
Flawed Soviet reactor design coupled with serious mistakes
made by the plant operators
Series of equipment failures

23. Expect the Unexpected…

24. Expect the Unexpected…
Accidents don’t just happen they are Caused!

25. Conclusion
THIS is why we require a Nuclear Safety and Security Culture to be ingrained in all staff who work in the nuclear industry!

26. Conclusion
Being part of South Africa’s nuclear industry. What we do today will affect the nuclear industry of tomorrow.
Perhaps the best acid test of our own nuclear safety & security culture is to use Admiral Rickover’s question:
Would you be happy to have your son or daughter operating what you have assisted to create?

27. Questions?