Building an "Adaptive Safety Culture" in a Nuclear Construction Project: Insights to Safety Practitioners

Nuclear power plant construction projects are challenging for safety management due to many of their inherent characteristics, which include high levels of organizational turbulence, changes in lifecycle phases, unanticipated events, interactions between multiple parties and the challenges of multicultural environment. This means that traditional approaches to improving safety might not be sufficient. To address this issue, we will view safety management from the perspective of Resilience Engineering and complexity thinking and propose a novel perspective to the practical development of safety culture in dynamic environments. We describe a revised model of adaptive safety management and use four well-known safety culture improvement methods as illustrative examples of how they can be utilized in building an adaptive safety culture.