An Evaluation of Safety and Health Data, with an Emphasis on Developing Performance Measures for Nuclear Chemical Facilities, Using Quantitative and Semi-quantitative Methods

The Department of Energy (DOE) has expanded the number of nuclear facilities using chemical processes to complete its waste management mission over the last decade. Recent facilities included the Actinide Removal Process/Modular Caustic Side-solvent extraction Unit (ARP/MCU) at Savannah River, the processing plants for the deconversion of depleted uranium hexafluoride at Portsmouth, Ohio and Paducah, Kentucky, and others. These nuclear chemical facilities combine the hazards of radioactive materials with those of complex chemical operations; but presently use an approach to safety management that is rooted in nuclear hazards analysis techniques. This approach tends to provide adequate coverage of the hazards associated with the radioactive materials, but does not capture the same level of detail for chemical hazards, which, in some cases, could act as the primary risk drivers for the facility.;At present, the nuclear industry and chemical industry each have their own approach to safety management. In a nuclear chemical facility, these two industries can be viewed as intersecting, and thus integrated safety measures to help ensure safe and efficient plant operations would be desirable. However, the inconsistency between the approaches of the two industries can pose a challenge for nuclear chemical facilities, which have many of the operational characteristics of a chemical plant but also must contend with radioactivity and other nuclear materials hazards (e.g. nuclear criticality). To date, the approaches of the industries are disparate.;The overall goal of this research was to analyze accidents from the chemical industry (through the chemical industry accident reports) and DOE nuclear chemical facilities (a select group of DOE occurrence reports) for trends to develop a set of predictive or leading safety and performance measures applicable to nuclear chemical facilities; essentially, to use information from past events to derive a set of performance measures that can be used proactively to improve safety management in such facilities.;This research mined the large database available in 60 published chemical industry accident reports and safety bulletins completed by the CSB, and relevant DOE occurrence reports over the past 15 years, representing accidents that have risen to reportable thresholds during that timeframe, as well as NRC abnormal occurrences reported to Congress during the same time frame. Analyzing the information presented in the accident reports through content analysis led to a list of issues common across many accidents that were used as focus areas for performance measure development. Each issue was used as the basis for the development of a theory about safety and efficiency of operations at nuclear chemical facilities, in a process of grounded theory development. Once the issues were translated into theories, these theories were combined with the data itself, including the issue and the textual associations of related issues, to postulate a set of recommended safety and performance measures. The inspiration for these performance measures came either from literature on leading performance measures referenced in the text, or the data itself.;Once a set of potential performance measures was developed, subject matter elicitation was used to determine which performance measures were both practical and effective for implementation at a nuclear chemical facility. The first step in the subject matter elicitation was review of the proposed measures by several experts at a DOE site to eliminate any repetitive or impractical measures (i.e. no measurement possible given the current operations of a nuclear chemical facility). These experts reduced the list by more than half, leaving 17 potential performance measures for the second step, analytic hierarchy process. In the analytic hierarchy process, nuclear safety, operations, and engineering subject matter experts, 40 in total, went through a hierarchical ranking process to select those performance measures that were most impactful to nuclear chemical facility operations. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).