ABSTRACT
The look at the history of the Department for the Study of Human Factors (SEFH) made it possible in particular to see the difficulties encountered by the project that warranted the creation of laboratory at the institute, namely “to obtain a fuller understanding of the behavior of operators at nuclear facilities (reactors, laboratories, plants, etc.) in order to be able to propose improvements in all areas that may contribute to enhancing safety, such as the display of information in control rooms, written procedures, operation and troubleshooting tools, organization of work, perception of risks and training.”187 Despite this failure, as our examples show, the human factors assessment does indeed exist and address a variety of valid subjects and its recommendations apply to nuclear facilities of all types. However, analyzing the recommendations from the various cases and placing emphasis on both types of analysis – causal analysis and analysis through comparison with a reference organizational model – will lead to underscoring weakness of the established knowledge. However, blame should not be laid on the human factors experts. Even though the findings of the scientific literature provide clarifications and lead to caveats, they enhance the state of knowledge in the field only marginally. What type of analysis is best used to perform an assessment? It seems that causal analysis, which clarifies the ties between human and organizational factors and safety of nuclear facilities, makes it possible to achieve higher rhetorical effectiveness – probably by getting the stakeholders on the same page, the chief objective of the
assessment – and higher cognitive effectiveness. Nevertheless, several “good reasons” justify analysis through comparison with a reference model188.
