The Commissioners were briefed this week by NRC staff and stakeholders on the agency’s safety culture initiatives
– Source NRC –
Opening Remarks: First, as you might have heard, the President has appointed new Commissioners. We anticipate having a full complement of five Commissioners as our new members get sworn in over the next few weeks. We look forward to their participation and engagement on the important issues before the agency.
One of those issues, which we will discuss today, is safety culture. The agency has increasingly focused on safety culture in recent years for the simple reason that we have found that a deteriorating safety culture is often associated with safety problems. Sound rules and procedures are certainly necessary to further safety, but the NRC and our licensees all need to continually work to cultivate the type of open, collaborative organizational culture that will best enable us to meet our safety and security goals.
Our agenda today reflects our active efforts to promote safety culture both here at the NRC and with NRC and Agreement State licensees and certificate holders. The NRC can take pride in the results of the 2009 Inspector General’s Safety Culture Survey. It reported that the agency’s safety culture and work climate scores are top-notch and compare favorably with those of high-performing private-sector companies. As always, we can’t rest on past successes and have to strive for continuous improvement. I look forward to hearing an update from the staff on our ongoing efforts to implement the Internal Safety Culture Task Force Recommendations, as well as our follow-up actions to the 2009 survey.
In terms of promoting safety culture within the regulated community, we have made significant progress towards developing a final revision of our safety culture policy statement. The draft statement makes clear that safety culture is no less important for our materials licensees than it is for reactor facilities, and that security issues are an important component of safety culture. I want to recognize the tremendous work by our staff and those public stakeholders who participated throughout this process. The staff held a public workshop and other public meetings, and solicited written comments, prior to developing the draft policy statement. These efforts were a great success, and the Commission will benefit greatly from the extensive public input in reaching a final decision on the draft statement.
Editor’s Note: Slides from this meeting are available here: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/commission/slides/2010/20100330/. More information on safety culture is available here: http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/enforcement/safety-culture.html.