Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Post

Diversity and inclusivity are crucial to gaining the perspectives and ideas that foster innovation. Find out how you can contribute as our next Environmental, Safety & Health Compliance Engineer Safety: https://bit.ly/3zrRCUT #engineering #PersonalDevelopment

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Functional Safety isn't a one-person job. Yet, I've seen it happen time and again: All safety expertise rests on a single engineer's shoulders. Sometimes, it's a C&I engineer with just weeks of training. This approach is a ticking time bomb. Errors slip through. Risks multiply. The solution? A lifecycle approach to Functional Safety. Every department, from tender to handover, needs to be competent and follow your FSMS. But how do you know where you stand? Enter the Functional Safety Maturity Grid (FSMG). This simple tool gives you honest feedback from all departments. It pinpoints your strengths and weaknesses. From there, you can target areas for continuous improvement. Have you assessed your organisation's Functional Safety maturity? Download your free copy https://lnkd.in/er-WHXs6  What surprised you most about the results? #SafetyCulture #ContinuousImprovement

Aaron McGuinness just posted about a recent site visit he completed for one of our RPS projects. It was his first time going on a site visit to conduct an assessment independently, and he did a great job and even got some hands on experience with equipment as part of a walkdown. His post asks about tips on how to prepare for a site visit. My list would be: ⌚ Leave extra time for travel mishaps 💃 Wear the right clothes and PPE- I once missed out on sitting in a fighter jet cockpit because I was wearing a dress... and have clomped around site in safety boots that are too big 📰 Get the paperwork forms done and bring the right documents with you, so they let you in! 🏭 Plan ahead and be proactive in asking to see equipment and get time booked in with people to make the most of the opportunity ❔ Prep your questions and think about what the issues and areas of interest might be 🙋♀️ Ask the questions more than once or rephrase if you need to I've probably forgotten something... which is a feeling that can haunt me in the preparation of going on site visits too! Check out Aaron McGuinness' post and let us know any tips of your own. #rpsrisk #rpsukic #inthefield #tetratech #humanfactors

Safety: The feds are looking for public comment on the environmental topics the NRC should consider in reviewing an application renewal for the Clinton reactor. #HSE #EHS #processsafety #industrialsafety https://bit.ly/44lvPJq

The recent global IT breakdown has been widely discussed in the safety community, and the notion of complexity was once again at the heart of the debate. Complexity is indeed a central concept in safety. It has been used to cover many different topics. It is useful to characterise work situations for instance, from simple to more complex ones, and to highlight the high-level of expertise needed to handle situations by front line workers, whether pilots, nurses, firefighters or control room operators, as evidenced by natural decision making by Gary Klein. Complexity has also been useful for conceptualising technology, by emphasising for instance differing characteristics of systems, from the most linear to more complex ones, as Charles Perrow argued. Of course, complexity has also proven useful in discriminating between organisations, from small to large scale and highly differentiated configurations entailing distinct challenges requiring tailored strategies, an issue addressed by Diane Vaughan. In this article, I add another use of the notion of complexity to these propositions by extending it, this time, to a global scale, recognizing the importance of recurring global events which imply a revisit of complexity. This includes the recent global IT breakdown. The payoff is a higher awareness of our increasingly interconnected world, and its incorporation into safety thinking. https://lnkd.in/eHfx7izz

A position paper for assessing and managing safety culture: Safety Critical Systems Club (SCSC) The Safety Culture Working Group, a volunteer group within the SCSC, has produced and published a position paper for assessing and managing safety culture. The paper is being presented tomorrow at the SCSC symposium in Bristol https://scsc.uk/e1007 With myself as lead author, and an editorial team including Jane Fenn, Louise Harney, Jeremy Hubbard, Dr James Laughton, Sarah Lay, Paul Leach, Kirk Mayes, Darren McMinn, Fraser Mellstrom, Mark Sujan, Matthew Twiselton and Mark Westwood. The position paper aims to provide high level guidance on the assessment and improvement of safety culture for organisations that design, build, assure and operate complex safety critical systems. It represents recognised good practice and can act as a benchmark and guidance. It (a) exemplifies how safety culture manifests itself, (b) provides guidance on good practice that organisations should aim to achieve and (c) draws out methods that are of particular importance to organisations involved in development and operation of safety-critical systems. The paper does not aim to provide detailed guidance or worked examples. Further reading and references are offered. The role of many SCSC organisations is to specify, design, make and assure complex safety critical systems, as well as to operate these systems and learn from experience. While the guidance in this paper may apply equally to all safety domains, it focuses on the safety of designing, manufacturing, assuring and operating complex safety critical systems. The position paper should help organisations understand how they can effectively assess and improve their safety culture. The paper can be downloaded from https://scsc.uk/scsc-189

COMMON CAUSE EVENTS Today’s post at The Process Safety Report is Process Hazards Analysis: Common Cause Events at https://lnkd.in/dgXzGBTA. Using the Fukushima-Daiichi incident as an example, the post describes (a) what common cause events are, (b) why they are so important, and (c) why PHA teams need to be vigilant for them (easier said than done).

The TMI accident was more than an unexpected progression of faults; it was more than a situation planned for but handled inadequately; it was more than a situation whose plan had proved inadequate. The TMI accident constituted a fundamental surprise in that it revealed a basic incompatibility between the nuclear industry’s view of itself and reality. Prior to TMI the industry could and did think of nuclear power as a purely technical system where all the problems were in the form of some technical area or areas and the solutions to these problems lay in those engineering disciplines. TMI graphically revealed the inadequacy of that view because the failures were in the socio-technical system and not due to pure technical nor pure human factors. https://lnkd.in/dxR_GGV9

Safety: A final rule to the Generic Environmental Impact Statement the NRC uses when considering applications to renew operating reactor licenses will soon end up issued. #HSE #EHS #processsafety #industrialsafety https://bit.ly/4ayBywW