During the recent years, there have been many discussions about safety and safety culture, which enable the development and understanding of the whole concept of safety. Although these are two different notions, they are in fact closely related, especially when accident events occur. Years ago, different companies and people were not or did not want to be aware of how bad safety culture is affecting the safety and what the consequences are. In my thesis, I did not focus on the consequences which are an ever-burning topic when it comes to nuclear energy, but on the meaning of safety culture and how it affects safety and other factors. The concept is dealt with widely by examining procedures and different methods, since this makes it easier to understand all the little things that seem irrelevant to many and have been said hundreds of times. I decided to investigate the safety culture in nuclear power plants, as this is a really specific field and since no other industry performs activities that could affect the safety of the whole world. In order to understand what safety culture in nuclear power plants really is, I decided to briefly describe the safety systems used in nuclear power plants, as well as the notion of safety culture on the whole, which is or is supposed to be present at all workplaces, no matter how safe they are
Many methods have been developed and many instructions given to show us in what direction safety culture should evolve, how it can be influenced, what its impact on safety, health, employees’ satisfaction, and working conditions is, how it can improve relationships and directly influence profits due to smooth operation and unnecessary shutdowns of plants because of failures which could have been prevented. I have shown in different ways how to teach such a culture, and at the same time researched the potential negative effects of misconduct and disregard of safety culture.
|
