The NRC and Nuclear Safety Culture: Do As I Say, Not As I Do, Union of Concerned Scientists
DAVE LOCHBAUM, DIRECTOR, NUCLEAR SAFETY PROJECT | FEBRUARY 27, 2017 Many times over the past 20 years the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has intervened when evidence strongly suggested a nuclear power plant had nuclear safety culture problems. The evidence used by the NRC to trigger its interventions was readily available to the plant owners, but the owners had downplayed or rationalized away the evidence until the NRC forced them to face reality.The evidence used by the NRC to detect these nuclear safety culture problems included work force surveys indicating a sizeable portion of workers reluctant to raise safety concerns and allegations received by NRC from workers about reprisals and harassment they experienced after raising safety concerns.
Ample evidence strongly suggests that the NRC itself has nuclear safety culture problems. The NRC’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has surveyed the safety culture and climate within the NRC every three years for the past two decades. The latest survey was conducted during 2015 and released in March 2016. Figure 1 from the OIG’s 2015 survey along with data from the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys and other sources show safety culture problems as bad as—it not considerably worse—than the worst safety culture problems identified at Millstone, Davis-Besse, and yes, even the TVA reactors.
After the OIG’s 2009 survey of the NRC’s safety culture and climate, UCS submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act for all records related to the actions taken by the agency in response to the survey. We obtained many records which described very few actions. And regardless of the number of actions, the OIG’s 2015 survey showed that the NRC’s safety culture was worse than in 2009 (see the last column on the right in Figure 1 [graph on original] ).
Why would the NRC take steps to remedy safety culture problems at nuclear plants yet have taken no steps to remedy its own safety culture problems? The answer is the same as to the question of why the plant owners failed to take steps to correct safety culture problems before the NRC intervened—they did not perceive the problems to exist. Likewise, Figure 2 [on original]shows that the NRC’s senior management does not perceive safety culture within the agency to need remediation……..
Just as plant owners failed to correct the problem they could not see, NRC senior management cannot fix the agency’s “invisible” safety culture problems. The NRC intervened to enable owners to see, and then fix, their safety culture problems. Someone needs to intervene to help NRC senior management see the agency’s safety culture problems so they can take the corrective measures they have often compelled plant owners to take…….http://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/the-nrc-and-nuclear-safety-culture-do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do
