ABSTRACT
It is widely recognised that organisational factors, or dimensions, play an important role in the safety of nuclear power plants. For example, the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group (INSAG) of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) emphasises that safety culture has two components: the organisational framework and the attitude of the staff. The work presented in this chapter is based on the fact that nuclear power plants are highly structured organisations (machine bureaucracies). The primary coordinating mechanism of work is the work process, that is, a standardised sequence of tasks designed to achieve a specific goal. The Work Process Analysis Model (WPAM) that is discussed in this chapter can be used in a number of ways:
• to contribute to the assessment of the safety culture at the plant; • to expand root-cause analysis, so that organisational factors
contributing to the incident can be identified; • to include organisational factors in Probabilistic Safety Assessments
(PSA).
