International information systems for accident avoidance - the role of the operators

Susceptibility to defects and problems of reliability detected in a plant should be corrected for the future in plants affected by these problems as an important building block in the safety of nuclear power plants. This requires exchanges of specific information among plants and their operators, especially so on an international scale. After the accident in the Swedish Forsmark plant in July 2006, there were indications to the effect that some of the problems discovered there had been known earlier from a different power plant. For this reason, the way in which information about reliability problems and susceptibility to defects is exchanged in the nuclear industry is now under study. The mechanisms involved are compared with practices in civil aviation. The purpose of the exercise is not to recommend one of the two systems as being superior. Instead, it is seen that the exchange of information is organized in completely different ways in the two industries, and that the attitudes of operators are also fundamentally different. The nuclear community and the aviation industry can learn from each other. One obvious solution which could be adopted by the power plant industry is to follow the example of aviation and install a privately organized international information system which would take as nodes power plant vendors instead of national evaluation agencies, as before. (orig.)