Human factors inclusion proposal in “reactor trip” to increase safety in operation

Abstract

A fundamental concept in nuclear reactor operation is that safety is the result of interactions between human, technological and organizational factors. The National Nuclear Energy Commission understands how human factors from psychological, physiological, behavioral and emotional origin can affect the reactor operation. For that reason, reactor operators are submitted to rigorous evaluations every ye ar. When conducting case study du ring these sixty years of IEA R1, three of them hypothetical and possible related to the reactor operation illustrates the co ncern about the safety and security : Case 1 Operator had a stroke during reactor operation in the control room. C ase 2 Operator suffered stress in traffic in his going to the reactor facility; when performing test in the emergency cooling system for reactor start up, he didn’t close a valve completely; changing the pool water technical quality causing a week delay in the reactor op eration . Case 3 Operator just arrived to afternoon shift in the control room, after a few minutes his co worker noticed that his cognition and behavior has changed, later in the hospital he was diagnosed with head cancer. This interdisciplinary work aims to include human factors of psychological , physiological and behavioral origin in 'reactor trip'. The ‘reactor trip’ (also know n as ‘scram’) usually applies to technical factors to avoid high consequence event, are protection circuits that can assume the s tatus of alert, hazard and essentially shut down the reactor automatically; when temperature, radioactivity, pressure, water flow, voltage and so on ; are out of the operating limits. Technologies associated with neuroscience and psychological assessments s uch as: Face Reader, Analogue Visual Mood Scale and Back Depression Inventory ; allows the evaluation of the operator in the control room. However, problems li ke described in the case study should be minimized. This inter disciplinary theoretical work is based on empirical doctoral thesis in progress.