Striking a balance between professionalism and strict adherence to procedures

It is frequently a delicate matter to strike the correct balance between reliance on the professionalism of an operating staff and the enforcement of strict procedures. At French nuclear facilities, the initial approach was to use procedures to ensure that instructions were strictly adhered to. A review of incident and accident procedures resulted in restructuring documents to organize operator action. As to general operating procedures in which more initiative is left to those involved the format of the documents and the way that they are arranged has scarcely changed since they were first issued. The trend has been to try to make the documents comprehensive, resulting in a considerable increase in their size and making it increasingly difficult to use them. As the nature of the documents has been the origin of numerous accidents (failure to comply with the documents, erroneous action, and operating incidents), the authors decided to review the form and content of the operating documents to determine what should be covered by rules and what should be left to the operator in terms of responsibility and freedom of action. It is in this perspective, at the request of Golfech power plant and with the participation of the operating department engineers and technicians, that the authors have tried to restructure radioactive release effluent management procedures