Work practices, fatigue, and nuclear power plant safety performance

This paper focuses on work practices that may contribute to fatigue-induced performance decrements in the commercial nuclear power industry. Specifically, the amount of overtime worked by operations, technical, and maintenance personnel and the 12-h operator shift schedule are studied. Although overtime for all three job categories was fairly high at a number of plants, the analyses detected a clear statistical relationship only between operations overtime and plant safety performance. The results for the 12-h operator shift schedule were ambiguous. Although the 12-h operator shift schedule was correlated with operator error, it was not significantly related to the other five safety indicators. This research suggests that at least one of the existing work practices--the amount of operator overtime worked at some plants--represents a safety concern in this industry; however, further research is required before any definitive conclusions can be drawn.