A Comment on Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection from a Historian of Science

Abstract

Cancer Stud Ther J, Volume 6(1): 1–2, 2021 In 1985 Hans Blix, the then IAEA Director General, called for the creation of an advisory committee in the area of nuclear safety. As a result, IAEA’s International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group (INSAG) was formed with the main objective to offer advice on matters of nuclear safety, produce safety standards, and identify nuclear safety issues of international significance [1]. Only a year later the newly created Advisory Group was faced with one of the most terrifying nuclear accidents in history: Chernobyl. The concept of ‘safety culture’ was first introduced in the report that the Advisory Group issued a few months after the accident. Product of a crisis in the nuclear industry, the concept of safety culture was defined and analyzed as “assembly of characteristics and attitudes in organizations and individuals, which establishes that, as an overriding priority, nuclear plant safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance.” Obviously, the emphasis was on organizational policies and managerial actions while individuals were seen as having “personal attitudes and habits of thought” linked to safety [2]. The aim was to strengthen the safety of nuclear power plants and avoid Chernobyl-type accidents in the future. Nevertheless, in a IAEA 2007 updated definition of culture, “nuclear power plant safety issues” (1986 definition) has been simply replaced by “protection and safety issues” [3] to mark a wider concern about safety culture in other “safety conscious industries” [4]. Evidently, since 1986 nuclear safety culture has been closely and primarily connected to organizational and technical issues within nuclear industrial settings leaving the medical sector largely unaffected. In this sense, culture is identified with learned behavior, a whole body of attitudes, habits, and practices passed on from one generation of nuclear operators to the next and related to the style of organizations and their culture. This understanding of safety culture is linked to earlier conceptualizations of culture—as static, shared, and uniform—that have prevailed in anthropology in the early part of the 20th century. The culture concept in use comes actually to mean the cultivation of people—in this case nuclear operators—through special technical education. Based on this perspective, individuals have been seen as complacent or in a position that is opposed to and thus outside culture [5-7].