Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : The 30th International Conference on Nuclear Engineering (ICONE30)
Date : May 21, 2023 - May 26, 2023
New perspectives of safety called Safety-II emphasize the importance of the resilience potentials of operator personnel for maintaining the safety of socio-technical systems such as nuclear power plants. However, the common safety measures based on traditional safety perspectives called Safety-I strongly require the elimination of failures by stricter compliance to rules and procedures, which can lead to organizational climates that do not tolerate even small failures. The concern is that such organizational climates can reduce learning opportunities through small failures and make it difficult to improve the resilience potentials of operator personnel. Therefore, this study conducted a cognitive experiment requiring the operation of Fire-fighting Command and Control Simulator (FCCS) to analyze the effects of failure tolerance on the operator’s attitude in the training session and on performance in responding to unexpected and novel events. The participants, twenty-eight university students, were divided into two groups depending on training conditions: low-failure-tolerance condition (Group-A) and high-failure-tolerance condition (Group-B). The results showed that, in the training session, more participants of Group-B showed the tendency of trying to learn new procedures in the scenarios that were unsuitable to be dealt with by standard procedures, while the participants of Group-A tended to avoid potential failure. This fact strongly implies that tolerance for failure can contribute to promoting the proactive learning attitude of operators, which can be indispensable to enhancing operators' and the safety of complex systems.
