Study of fundamental concepts for enhancing the safety of Nuclear Power Plants

The world unclear industry and regulatory authorities have experienced various serious accidents including TMI-2, Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi accidents so far. The industry organizations and the regulators work on reflecting the lessons learned from these accidents, and continuously study the lessons from actual operation and maintenance of their systems, equipment and processes. From this reflection and study they seek to establish a common, dedicated and effective 'safety culture'. Very importantly, they establish and agree on key concepts, principles, requirements, and measures to ensure the safety and reliability of nuclear plants and activities; and protect individuals, the public-at-large and the environment. However, the individual positions and meanings of the key results throughout the entire group of organizations, the relationship among them, the needed structure and organization of nuclear safety implementation, mechanism of safety enhancement, etc. are not necessarily clear. In this paper, examples of this lack of clarity are reported and improvements are suggested. (author)