[en] The Senior Expert Group of the Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations (CSNI) proposed to Principal Working Group 1 (PWG1) of CSNI that a workshop be held to identify and discuss issues related to the impact of human factors and organisational aspects on decommissioning. This workshop was held in May 1999 in conjunction with the Joint NEA/IAEA/EC workshop on The Regulatory Aspects of Decommissioning. The workshop goals, as stated in the NEA Research Strategies for Human Performance, were 'to convene an information exchange meeting with interested Member countries in order to discuss areas of concern in this respect and identify possible areas that merit further research and their priorities'. The workshop highlighted a comparative lack of developed work in this area concerning the way in which organisational weaknesses can manifest themselves and how best to prevent or mitigate their effects. Eight key issues were identified and discussed by the participants. For each of the eight issues discussed by working groups, the potential risks of failing to address the Issue were identified. These potential risks formed a focal point for generating discussion about current experience and for drawing out gaps in current knowledge and understanding. From this base, participants then focused on specific types of information and questions that need further research in order to improve understanding and successful implementation of the transition from operations to decommissioning. The eight issues and suggested high priority needs are: - Creating a system to share international experience: Establish improved methods for obtaining and sharing information and experience on a regular basis in order to identify organisational and human factors issues, good practices and lessons learned as regulators and utilities deal with decommissioning. - Organisational memory and competence: Identify effective approaches to retain expertise during the transition from operations to decommissioning. This information could be obtained through comparisons of different plant strategies (e.g. alternative incentive systems). Develop methods for enhanced preservation and transfer of information about plant status to workers carrying out decommissioning. - Organisational functions and management skills during transition from operations to decommissioning: Identify what organisational processes used at operating plants can transfer successfully to decommissioning plants and what processes do not transfer successfully or are not appropriate under decommissioning. Compare plants using operating plant management for transition with plants using separate decommissioning team to determine effective practices. (While both approaches can be effective, it is useful to identify different advantages and problems associated with each strategy.) Identify and evaluate different approaches to using contractors compared to retaining permanent workers. - Safety culture and morale: Study measures that have been used by plants to sustain safety culture to identify both effective and ineffective approaches. Compare measures plants use to sustain safety culture across transition periods during decommissioning. Identify periods of greater vulnerability to lowered safety culture and morale. - Contractor reliance: Identify generic experience transferable across sites and site-specific issues that require plant staff participation based on the experiences of contractor organisations that specialise in decommissioning and plants that have used these types of contractors. Compare plants relying primarily on plant staff to plants relying primarily on contractors. This study could identify both effective methods and types of difficulties encountered under these alternative strategies. - Multi-unit sites: Identify effective methods and specify problems and mitigation strategies used by multi-unit sites that have decommissioned one unit while another is operating. Compare the advantages and disadvantages of alternative staffing methods (e.g. using a dedicated, separate staff for shut down and operating units as compared to rotating staff responsibilities between the two types of units). - Delayed dismantlement: Identify methods to sustain competence and resources over extended periods of several generations. Identify the organisational and human factor aspects likely to affect release and exposure risks under delayed dismantlement compared to early dismantlement. - Reconciling differing regulatory and government policies and requirements: Identify areas of overlap and contradiction among agencies and policies within agencies that affect the ability of organisations to effectively decommission