ML090700700
| ML090700700 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Fermi, Wolf Creek, Columbia, Fort Calhoun  |
| Issue date: | 04/01/2004 |
| From: | - No Known Affiliation |
| To: | |
| References | |
| Download: ML090700700 (6) | |
Text
"Safety culture."
It's been in the nuclear industry's vocabulary for more than a decade. But just what is safety culture? What kind of safety culture does your plant have, and how does it affect plant safety and performance?
The Utilities Service Alliance (USA),
a not-for-profit cooperative owned and operated by its 13 nuclear utility mem-bers, took on the issue with a series of safety culture assessments beginning in 2003. USA member plants receiving safety culture assessments include Fort Calhoun Station, Donald C. Cook Nuclear Plant, Wolf Creek Generating Station, Cooper Nuclear Station, Fermi 2, Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, Columbia Generating Station. USA also completed an assessment for SalemIHope Creek Generating Station, and three such assessments for Ontario Power Generation in Canada. Assess-ments are scheduled for USA member Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona and for the University ofMissouri research reactor.
As with all U.s. nuclear power sta-tions, the USA member plants were expected to complete a safety culture self-assessment in response to recom-mendation 2 of INPO Significant Oper-ating Experience Report 02-4, "Reactor Pressure Vessel Head Degradation at Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station,"
issued in November 2002.
We hold up a mirror to each plant and show how it looks to the out-side world."
-Joe Muth "By the time the SOER came out, USA was well-positioned to meet the require-ment for safety culture self-assessments,"
says Bill O'Connor, vice preSident of nuclear generation at Detroit Edison, chainnan of USA's board of directors and executive sponsor for the assess-ment program. "We had already done round-robin peer assessments of the member plants in specific areas such as operations, maintenance and emergency
planning, and we had decided to do the safety culture assessments in advance of theSOER" The foundation for the USA approach comes from SOER 02-4, which dis-cusses the pitfalls of justifying mini-mum standards rather than ensuring high standards. A number of things can contribute to such a reduction in stan-dards, including a lack of management oversight, overly focusing on shon-term production goals, solving the symptoms rather than the real causes of problems, not being sensitive enough to nuclear safety, and not using operat-ing experience effectively.
The USA approach involves an assess-ment at each member plant using a team of up to 13 experienced leaders from the other USA stations, with one team member from the host site. The week-long assessments are rigorous, comparing each plant to approximately 90 behavioral characteristics associated with a conservative safety culture model. The purpose is to determine the degree to which each member plant has a healthy respect for nuclear safety and to ensure that nuclear safety is not.
compromised by production priorities.
24 THE NUCLEAR PROFESSIONAL SECOND QUARTER 2004
~
~
~afety Culture Assessments Root Out Problems, Lead to Excellence
>On both fronts, the overall results of feUSA assessments have been positive,
~ptareas to improve have been found at
¢~~h of the stations assessed.
"To evaluate each member plant's
$afety culture, USA developed a behav-iPf~based assessment process. The pre-
,cepts,of INPO's "Principles for Effective
'.* Operational Decision-Making" and "Warning Flags from Plants in Extended i'$h1.ltdowns," as well as other industry
~n.d NRC documents, were used as
- ~tanc41rds for the plan development.
t't/'Each assessment is a combination of Jnterviews and behavioral observations,"
e?'Plains Bob Zemenski, supervisor -
.~~clear quaUty assurance oversight at
~~.rmi 2, who served as the USA assess-Plrl1t program manager. "We interview alJout 10 percent of the station staff during
- ft(,
- ' tll~ first couple of days of each assess-
~X(;ln~nt, then tum our attention to observ-
- ,/~)i~gwork behaviors, attending meetings
,>'". arid briefs, and touring the plants."
Zemenski helped develop the overall plan, which includes sepa-interview question banks for senior management, middle management, engineering, operations, oversight and the crafts. Each interview and observation assesses one or more of the 90 desired behavioral characteristics, with each "behavior given a 1-5 score to quantify strengths and weaknesses. A running tally is displayed on the team's meeting room walls at the host plant during the assess-ment week. Any area receiving a score of 2 or lower raised flags and garnered additional investigation to get at the root cause.
"We hold up a mirror to each plant and show how it looks to the outside world," saysJoe Muth, an operations shift manager at the Columbia Generat-ing Station who participated in all the safety culture assessments and served as team leader on several. "As we did the assessments, we learned better ways of doing things at the next station, but we still kept the same structure exactly as formatted for consistency and fair-ness. Wherever we went, we were welcomed and viewed as compadres and peers, there to help."
Results of the safety culture assess-ments help participating plants gain a better understanding of where improve-ments might be beneficiaL Here's how three USA plants have used the assessments.
Safety culture ISIlSSIIIlnl spurs
'grub bunllng' Something is strikingly out of place in Ross Ridenoure's otherwise all-busi-ness office at Fort Calhoun Station in Nebraska. As a prominent reminder of how not to solve station problems, Ridenoure keeps in his office an annoy-ing but memorable child's game called Whac-a-Mole. The object of the game:
reactively hammer back moles -
symbolic of station problems - as they emerge. And keep whacking the popup moles, which keep coming one after the other, because mole whacking does not get to the root cause of problems.
The real solution to nuisance moles
- aka plant problems - is to find the true nature of the problems. That deep-seated problem is not the mole popula-tion, but the grubs that sustain the moles.
Fort Calhoun recently launched a "no mole whacking" program to encourage station employees to "hunt for grubs"
- find the root causes - rather than pound away at superficial problems.
"The 'grubs' are much harder to frnd and eliminate than the 'moles'," says Ridenoure, vice president and chief 25
nuclear officer for Omaha Public Power District. "But when you under-stand and address the essential prob-lem, then the station can truly fix the problem - best case, permanently."
Inspiration for Ridenoure's campaign to replace mole whacking with grub hunting came from a USA safety culture assessment conducted early in 2003.
Ridenoure, who serves as vice chairman on USA's board of directors, says the visiting assessment team looked for grubs, not moles.
"This was a very intrusive assess-ment, unlike any we've ever had,"
Ridenoure says. "Our staff described it as 'in-your-face, eye-opening and jaw-dropping.' Before the assessment, we were confident that we didn't have Significant problems and that our work-force was very motivated and engaged.
So at first we just couldn't believe we were being told that in some areas our employees did not routinely uphold the highest standards or exhibit a question-ing attitude."
After reading the assessment team's detailed written report, the Fort Calhoun staff fully embraced and con-curred with the findings. It was easy to accept the strengths - operations suc-cession planning, radiation protection practices, plant eqUipment reliability, employee dedication and OPPD corpo-rate commitment to Fort Calhoun's long-term operation. But it was more difficult to address the weaknesses -
industrial safety, signs of complacency in some areas, a need for more intrusive and critical QA obsezvations, inconsistent use of operating experience, a too-high severity threshold for documenting prob-lems through the condition reporting system, and misunderstood or unclear management expectations.
Fort Calhoun collectively rolled up its sleeves and started hunting grubs. Over the past year, the station has retooled its performance indicators, ramped up communications with employees, added new QA staff members with the skills to be intrusive and ask the right questions, pumped up its operating experience program with comprehen-sive daily e-rnail event reports and pre-outage documentation, and clarified and reinforced management expectations on when to write a condition repon These and other efforts are paying off, as demonstrated by an improving trend in Fort Calhoun's new safety culture index. The staff created the voluntary index, one ofbut a few in the industry, as part of its effort to improve plant performance indicators. Based loosely on a concept borrowed from Millstone Nuclear Power Station, Fort Calhoun's station-tailored safety culture index rolls up about 30 plant perfor-mance factors into three overall areas of standards adherence, equipment reli-ability and organizational effectiveness.
Over the past three quarters, the index has improved from 2.5 to 2.85, moving closer to the short-term goal to be at or above 3 on the 0-4 scale (with 4 being the elusive perfect).
Ridenoure says the safety culture assess-ment that spurred these improvements was "This was a very intrusive assessment...
our staffdescribed it as 'in-your-face, eye-opening and jaw-dropping. '"
-Ross Ridenoure 26 THE NUCLEAR PROFESSIONAL SECOND QUARTER 2004
valuable. "It was painful but meaningful, with value added to the nth degree. It's like money in the bank, enabling us to continue operating at a high level" Questfor Excellenceat Columbia Columbia Generating Station in Washington has benefited both from its own safety culture assessment and also from the experience joe Muth gained as a team member on USA safety culture assessments at other plants. Each time Muth returned to Columbia from an assessment at another plam, he brought with him new perspectives and anec-dotes about how other stations face similar plant issues.
"We're somewhat geographically isolated from the rest of the nuclear fleet, and so we covet people coming in and giving us a chance to learn from Columbia's assessment gave the station a clear view of its strengths as well as areas for improvement.
them," says Rod Webring, vice presi-dent of nuclear generation at Energy Northwest and a director on USA's board.
Columbia's assessment gave the station a clear view of its strengths as well as areas for improvement. The visiting team praised Columbia's all-hands meeting to discuss SOER 02-4, training and operating experience programs, peer-based safety program, manager-supervisor communication and commitment to operator training quality. Recommendations included that Columbia do more with policies and incentives to more effectively rein-force a strong safety culture, give more management attention to the corrective action program, elevate the value added from QA, and fully address equipment reliability problems that challenge the operations staff.
Columbia's Quest for Excellence campaign launch occurred shortly after the safety culture assessment visit ended.
The program addresses 83 actions in five overall areas - industrial safety, problem identification and resolution, outage and work management effective-ness, equipment reliability, and accuracy and completeness of staff work - and 27
I
- Your input needed on INPO blankets the assessment results, as well as
. safety culture document additional areas where the Columbia staff Last November, INPO issued a pre-limihary version of Principles for a Strong Nuclear Safety Culture. The document is intended to clearly define what safety culture is and what it looks
'like and to help stations strengthen their skills and tools to improve safety culture. Station personnel are encour-aged to make in-depth comparisons between these principles and their day-to-day policies and practices and to use any differences as a basis for improvement Principles for a Strong Nuclear Safety Culture is a work in progress. INPO needs industry input to review and refine the document hi particular:
- Experiences in applying the safety
. culture principles at work
- Short case studies that contain (pr<lI"""""J
~~"(SI)")CirJ>>
real-life situations demonstrating successes or shortfalls in applying the principles A variety of methods are available to prOvide this input, including a discus-sion forum on the safety culture page of the INPO Web site (http://
www.inpo.org/xdiscussionboardl Seasp). lNPO will incorporate indus-try feedback into a final version of the document, which will be released later this year.
Principles for a StrorigN1Klear Safety Culture is available on the INPO Web site, ~derRes9urce (http://
www.inpo.orglLibrarylDocumentsi INrO~Aca?emyDocumen~l:.'YCat~...
egorylPIiIlc~rl~).For lIlore information, pl~asecontac:t Charlie.Brooks, INPO IndustryllIl~Ext~IR~eol1S' (770) 644-8398, broo~cr@inpo.org Pri*ncipl*~~**.Jor.**.*~."**StrQn*9 Nuclear Safety Culture saw room for improvement.
"We're moving forward and starting to see some benefits from all the hard work," says Webring. "Every other Friday, about 30 managers meet to discuss our progress on our goals, any new resource needs or any course cor-rections we need to stay on track.
"We are beginning to hear some positive feedback from our staff as we implement improvements to our pro-cesses, programs and performance.
And, we're making sure to involve employees in our Quest for Excellence program to help us identify other improve-ment initiatives and efficiencies in the way we perfonn work. In addition to their regular performance improvement workload, our departments' continuous improvement coordinators are working with management and with their employ-ees to make sure we're all on the same page and that management is listening to ideas and suggestions for improvement."
Webring says that five new initiatives have been added as a direct result of feedback from employees.
"Involving everyone that has a stake in Energy Northwest and Columbia Generating Station's success is a win-win for all of us."
Doing what's rightItWall Creek Like their counterparts, many employ-ees at Wolf Creek Generating Station in Kansas were rather content with the plant'S improved performance in recent years. Then the visiting USA assessment team scored the plant's performance.
"The feedback was that we're not as good as we think we are," says Kevin Moles, Wolf Creek's regulatory affairs manager and host peer for the team.
"One Significant strength was that no matter who was interviewed or observed, the plant staff showed that we do what's right from a safety perspective. Then there were other areas where we could be better - corrective actions, human 28 THE NUCLEAR PROFESSIONAL SECOND QUARTER 2004
perfonnance and looking at backlogs in the aggregate."
As a result, Wolf Creek has launched a series of initiatives. The first focuses on leadership and organizational effec-tiveness in order to refine the culture from the top down. The leadership improvement initiative looks for ways to improve communication, increase trust and enhance the station leaders' own accountability. "We're beginning with quantitative actions, increasing the number and variety of ways we 'touch' employees," says Moles. "Next, we'll get feedback to see how we're doing and start tweaking the outreach."
A second initiative is to improve the regognition and timeliness of condition report generation. Wolf Creek now emphasizes documentation of these conditions immediately rather than waiting until more infonnation is gath-ered. "We would sometimes wait to write the initial condition report until we felt we had a better understanding of the situation," says Moles. "This could take a day or two. Our goal is to have all condition reports generated the same day the condition is identified."
Wolf Creek's third new initiative centers on the new performance "One significant strength was that no matter who
was interviewed or observed, the plant staff showed
that we do whats right from a safety perspective."
improvement and learning group at the station, staffed by a team assembled from multiple plant disiplines. From the new group, a perfonnance advocate is now assigned to each department manager. These perfonnance advocates shed light on precursors to potential problems.
"We are entrUsted to 'operate a nuclear power plant with the highest levels of safety and to protect the health and safety of the public," says Moles.
"That's what we're going to do. We're not happy standing still."
Maintaining the status quo isn't an option, anyway. USA members will continue the safety culture peer assess-ments, with another round of plant visits planned for 2005.*
-Kevin Moles Contacts: Kevin Moles, Wolf Creek, (620) 364-4126, kemoles@Wcnoc.com; Bill O'Connor, Fenni 2 (734) 586-5201, oconnorw@dteenergy.com; Carl Parry, USA, (913) 451-5641, carl.parry@USainc.org; Ross Ridenoure, Fort Calhoun, (402) 636-3221, rridenoure@oppd.com; Rod Webring, Columbia Generating Station, (509) 377-4279, rlwebring@energy-northwest.com 29