Identification of occupational stress factors of commissioning workers in nuclear power plants based on a bottom-up survey design and factor analysis

Commissioning is a final technical barrier for nuclear power engineering projects, the occupational stresses of commissioning workers make nuclear power projects face great human factor safety risk. A bottom-up methodology and factor analysis were adopted to identify the occupational stress factors of commissioning workers in NPPs, whereby the authors firstly made a field survey on the commissioning engineers and technical managers of an NPP in the first stage to develop a customized questionnaire suitable for nuclear power commissioning workers, then conducted another field survey in the second stage to collect data, and finally adopted factor analysis method to extract out 15 occupational stress factors from a sample of 143 participants in two nuclear power projects at different locations in China. These factors help us to formulate countermeasures to balance occupational challenge and prevent human factor safety risk of NPP commissioning workers. Additionally, social stress factors and emotional needs of commissioning workers and their families should also be considered. (author)