Development of Safety Culture Hazard Factors Analyzer in Nuclear Power Plants

Safety culture has become an important topic in NPPs primarily during last two decades. The concept of safety culture in NPPs was introduced by the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group (INSAG) in the post-accident meeting after the Chernobyl accident in 1986. It is difficult to analyze specific influences of all safety culture factors because of the dimensionality problems caused by a large number of input variables as well as application difficulties associated with analysis tools. Even though some safety culture assessment methods may have significant advantages, often these methods cannot provide enough evidence of causal relationships and the statistical inferences among a large number of input variables. Data mining has emerged as one of the key features for data computing and analysis to conduct a data analysis. To this end, an integrated approach called response surface data mining (RSDM) is proposed in order to overcome both dimensionality and analysis problems simultaneously. First of all, on/off line hazard factors of safety culture based on comparative studies among important safety culture reports from IAEA, INPO, and NRC are generated by using quality function deployment (QFD) analysis. Next, a new hazard factor index for safety culture is proposed including three types of characteristics (i.e., the smaller the better, the larger the better, and the nominal the best types).