Enhancing safety culture and safety leadership in the Swedish nuclear power industry

This paper describes a project commissioned by the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) with the objective of enhancing safety culture in the Swedish nuclear power industry. The project arose following an international conference on safety culture held by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2002, which yielded a conclusion that regulators should encourage a sincere interest in safety culture among licensed operators. In response to this recommendation, SKI began to explore a proactive path to safety culture enhancement, designed to gain a better understanding of the current safety culture status of the industry and to assess the extent to which human factors and safety culture issues were being understood and addressed within nuclear power facilities in Sweden. The project was intended to stimulate action by senior managers to review and enhance the safety culture and practices at their facilities, and to provide the regulator with an understanding of the strengths and possible opportunities for improvement relating to safety culture in this industry. The first of these objectives was met through a series of data collection and analysis phases, culminating in Management Workshops at each of the participating sites. The second objective was achieved by drawing together data from different sites into a report for the regulator of industry-wide findings regarding safety culture and the application of human factors principles (see Lowe & Hayward, 2006).