Abstract
Human factors experts in many industries experience challenges communicating the importance of human performance issues with people from outside the human factors community. Human factors staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) are addressing this situation by conducting outreach activities to ensure that NRC project managers understand the scope of human factors activities. Human factors principles were used to create a decision-support tool to help NRC project managers promptly and accurately identify human factors issues in license applications. Since the rollout and implementation of the tool, there has been a noticeable increase in prompt and accurate routing of licensing actions to the human factors experts. A description of the process used to create the desk guide and a summary of outreach activities is included in the hopes that other organizations may achieve similar results.
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Notes
- 1.
The NRC did not conduct human factors reviews prior to the Three Mile Island accident of 1979. So, although this was an event caused, in part, by human factors considerations, this would not be a relevant example to the current discussion because the review process at the time was not comparable to the process used today.
- 2.
Increasing sensitivity (or d’) would be indicative of increasing the ability of the project manager to distinguish human factor issues from non-human factors issues (noise). We would expect the number of hits to increase (and misses to decrease) with a minimal effect on the number of false alarms.
- 3.
Increasing the response bias (or beta) would increase the probably of the project manager saying “yes, a human factors review is necessary”. We would expect both the number of hits and false alarms to increase. Misses would also decrease, but an additional cost is incurred as false alarms increase.
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Acknowledgments
The positions described in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the U.S. Government. Special thanks to Joe Giitter, Sam Lee, Sunil Weerakkody, Aida Rivera-Varona, George Lapinsky, Steven Lynch, and Niav Hughes for your support and for reviewing and improving the desk guide.
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Green, B.D. (2018). When is a Human Factors Review Appropriate? Development of a Human Factors Screening Tool for Nuclear Regulatory Commission Project Managers. In: Fechtelkotter, P., Legatt, M. (eds) Advances in Human Factors in Energy: Oil, Gas, Nuclear and Electric Power Industries. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 599. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60204-2_1
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