Operators' Recovery Behaviors from Noncompliance under a Simulated Emergency

The purpose of this paper is to examine operational behaviors such as an operator's noncompliance and recovery behaviors in conducting emergency operating procedures (EOPs) under a simulated emergency. EOPs are plant procedures that direct operator actions necessary to mitigate the consequences of transients and accidents that have caused plant parameters to exceed reactor protection system set points, engineered safety feature set points, or other established limits. For this reason, EOPs should be developed to reduce an operator's cognitive burden and to enhance an operator performance related to an EOP operation. However, it has been reported that an EOP requires an operator's cognitive efforts in coping with offnormal events. Some research has shown that it can be caused by a mismatch between a static model (i.e., prescribed tasks in EOPs) and a dynamic process (i.e., the nature of an on-going situation). We also observed an operator's noncompliance through an analysis of the emergency training records collected from a full scope simulator of a Westinghouse 3-loop pressurized water reactor (PWR). We also provided suggestions for improvement in EOPs to reduce the likelihood of operator noncompliance with EOPs based on the evidence of mismatches from the operator behavior analysis of a simulated emergency. In this paper, we focused on an operator's recovery actions observed through the operator behavior analysis of a simulated emergency. Operators recover from their own noncompliance, or that of other operators, variously during an EOP operation