Working practices and safety culture in nuclear power plant operations (WOPS): WOPS summary report

WOPS project concentrates on human and organisational factors. The project focused on two main topics, the development of the competencies of control-room operators and the organisational culture in high-reliability organisations. Within these topics several studies were accomplished in which practically relevant problems of the both Finnish Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) were tackled. Thus, the studied issues were transformation of operational expertise in generation change situation, constraints on control-room operators in fire situations, organisational culture in the STUK Nuclear Reactor Regulation department and organisational culture in the maintenance department of the Loviisa NPP. As a background of the latter study an analysis of human errors in maintenance was conducted. New empirical results were achieved in these studies. The work also contributed to a long-term methodological aim to develop a new framework for the analysis of human conduct in dynamic, complex and uncertain situations.