Introduction

The organizers opened the Brazil-U.S. Workshop on Strengthening the Culture of Nuclear Safety and Security by welcoming the assembled participants and presenting an overview of the workshop’s goals.

Jose Carlos Bressiani opened the workshop, stating that the event kicked off the Instituto de Pesquisas Energéticas e Nucleares (IPEN, the Institute of Nuclear and Energy Research) 50th anniversary celebration. He noted that the international workshop focused on an area that is important and becoming increasingly relevant to Brazil and its growing role in the nuclear world. He welcomed the assembled group of researchers, professors, and specialists of the highest levels from the United States and from companies and institutions in Brazil. He thanked and congratulated all who planned and organized the event.

Robert Bari thanked the Brazilian hosts, in particular, Dr. Barroso, Dr. Bressiani, and Dr. Salati, as well as the many other organizers for all their planning and hard work and for providing a hospitable setting for the event. He noted that the U.S. team was very grateful for the opportunity to be there to exchange fresh ideas on nuclear safety and security culture. It is of paramount importance to have frank and open discussions in the area of nuclear safety and security to help build new bridges between our respective nuclear enterprises and to pave new paths for future work. He noted that the Brazilian experts attending the workshop represent several organizations and diverse disciplines within the country with diverse technical objectives. The U.S. team was composed of individuals with varied backgrounds and technical interests as well. Both countries had assembled a wide range of expertise to discuss the topic areas. The U.S. team had been assembled under the auspices of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

The goals of the workshop, he said, are to emphasize the importance of the culture of nuclear safety and security, to enable U.S. and Brazilian experts to share and promote best practices developed in the two countries and around the world, and to help to establish the relationships among key Brazilian and American people and organizations to strengthen the culture of nuclear safety and security in both countries. This will be done through examining aspects of nuclear safety and security culture identified by the planners, including how safety

and security cultures exist in the research, industrial, and regulatory sectors. The closing session of the workshop focuses on ideas for future areas of collaboration specifically. The published summary of the workshop is intended to help the two countries move forward in this area.

Dr. Bari asked, why bring the subject of safety culture and security culture together within one workshop? He suggested that it is hard enough to just deal with either of them on their own: They have effectively different contexts, which, when bringing them together, may inhibit fruitful discussion. Some see synergies between the two areas and sense that it would be beneficial to bring them under consideration as a broader area for exploration. Can methods, progress, and lessons learned in one area inform areas in the other? There is value in considering both areas together in one workshop. Dr. Bari said we should not overplay similarities and potential synergies between the areas; nor should we underplay them. The trick is to gain insights and then test them in different contexts to see what can be learned and exploited. Safety culture as it relates to organizations with high-hazard materials and operations is broader than just the nuclear arena, and there are likely to be higher-level principles and practices, he said.

For the nuclear enterprise, there is a third area of interest with regard to potential hazards. This is the proliferation of weapons. International safeguards, as promoted by the International Atomic Energy Agency and other organizations, provide the institutional context for this area. Some practitioners advocate what is called a “three S” approach to protection against potential hazards: safety, security, and safeguards. The notion of designing and operating nuclear systems that simultaneously optimize protection across all three S’s has been discussed at international meetings. A corollary to the safety culture and the security culture would be an international safeguards culture that would promote nonproliferation. For the present workshop, however, the focus is on safety and security cultures. While both have the common goal of protecting the public, workers, and the environment from radiological materials, the cultures are quite different in at least one sense. The safety domain tends to encourage openness or transparency, sharing of best practices, open communication with the public, and peer review by diverse stakeholders. The security area, on the other hand, by virtue of the information that it must work with, tends to be closed. Information is usually regarded to be sensitive, and there is concern that vital information might fall into the hands of any adversary. However, it is broadly recognized that a nuclear organization, either an operator or a regulator, must put a high emphasis on safety and security in order to protect against unfavorable radiological consequences. This is a fundamental aspect of the cultural construct. The rest of the workshop addressed these issues and more.