Shouldering risks : the culture of control in the nuclear power industry / Constance Perin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Perin, Constance.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nuclear power plants--Risk assessment.

Nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power plants--Safety measures.

Nuclear industry--Risk management.

Nuclear industry.

Business anthropology.

Risk management.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 379 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2005]

Summary:

At the world's some 440 nuclear power plants, experts continually monitor their wide safety margins, and at signs of trouble seek out the sources and recommend changes. Too often for their comfort, and for ours, a subsequent problem reveals that these changes were ineffective or never made. Why this self-defeating pattern? What in this technology's culture of control might undermine experts' best intentions? What kind of problem is it to reduce operating risks?

Following brief highlights of this industry's history over the last twenty years of accidents, near-accidents, and institutional changes, Shouldering Risks presents excerpts from interviews with some sixty experts about four relatively recent events at three U.S. plants. Drawing also on her earlier field studies at eleven plants in America and abroad, on industry documents, and others' research, Constance Perin identifies unacknowledged elements in this industry's culture of control; for example, control concepts for reactor design, construction, and regulation carry over to risk handling and event analysis, whose efficacy depends instead on recognizing and interpreting the significance of technical and contextual signals on daily display.

Far more than the sum of its parts, this highly knowledge-dependent technology operates along an axis of meanings, not only along an axis of functions. A culture of control is, like any culture, an intricate system of claims about how to understand the world and act in it. Here, claims pivot around the dynamics of control theory and productivity based on particular assumptions about the relationships of humans to machines, models to reality, certainty to ambiguity, rationality to experience. These four events and accident analyses show that such assumptions can confound control and produce misleading meanings.

Shouldering Risks reimagines a broader and deeper culture of control to reshape our understandings of the intellectual capital appropriate to designing, regulating, organizing, and managing this risky enterprise and, perhaps, other such technologies already here or to come.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Complexities in Control 1

The Limits of Regulation and Self-Regulation 5

The Tradeoff Quandary 9

Concerns, Commitments, and Control 17

The Nuclear Connection: Naval and Corporate Orders 23

The Cycle of Self-Improvement: The Event Review System 28

Chapter 2 Arrow Station: A Leaking Valve in Containment 35

An Account of a Valve Repair Effort 35

Event Inquiries 44

The Teams' Reports 48

Insights and Excursions 59

The Parts Template 88

Chapter 3 Bowie Station: A Reactor Trip and a Security Lapse 98

An Account of an Automatic Reactor/Turbine Trip 98

Trip Event Review Team Report 100

Insights and Excursions 103

An Account of a Security Lapse 120

Mis-Authorization Event Review Team's Report 123

Insights and Excursions 125

The Two Events: Tangential or Essential? 142

Chapter 4 Charles Station: Transformer Trouble 144

An Account of a "Significant Near-Miss" on a Generator Step-up Transformer 144

Witnessing "A New Find" 151

Team Reports 154

The Reception of the "Organizational Effectiveness" Team Report 158

Insights and Excursions 162

Chapter 5 Logics of Control 196

Three Logics of Control Culture 198

An Infrastructure of Conundrums 203

Control in Real Time 209

Doubt, Discovery, and Interpretation 213

Words, Meanings, and Deeds 217

Standing in the Way: A System of Claims 224

Crystallizing the Difference: Numbers and Values 230

Objective and Subjective, Technical and Substantive 235

Certainty and Ambiguity, Doubt and Discovery 237

Chapter 6 Intellectual Capital for Regulation and Self-Regulation 240

Controlling and Coordinating Knowledge 242

The Scope of Event Reviews 248

"Maintenance Is Going to Save You" 257

"Levels of Maturity" 262

Re-Imagining the Culture of Control in the Nuclear Power Industry 266

From Functions to Meanings: A Second Axis for Risk-Reduction 270

Into the Next Half-Century 276

Appendix 1 Senior Management Group at Overton Station 283

Appendix 2 Nuclear Power Plant Modes of Operation or Shutdown 286

Appendix 3 Study Description 288.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [325]-366) and index.

ISBN:

0691070032

OCLC:

55624905