Human Error in the Transportation of Spent Nuclear Fuel

This paper summarizes work completed on human factors contributions to risks from spent nuclear fuel transportation. Human participation may have significant effects on the levels and types of risks from transportation of spent nuclear fuel by enabling or initiating incidents and exacerbating adverse consequences. Human errors are defined as the result of mismatches between perceived system state and actual system state. In complex transportation systems such mismatches may be distributed in time (e.g., during different stages of design, implementation, operation, maintenance) and location (e.g., human error, its identification, and its recovery may be geographically and institutionally separate). Risk management programs may decrease the probability of undesirable events or attenuate the consequences of mismatches. To be successful, they must be based in part on the analysis of human reliability data. This paper presents an overview of the availability and quality of human reliability data for spent fuel transportation risk assessments. In addition, we identify example prior occurrences of “human errors” during different stages and activities of spent nuclear fuel transportation. We have used such data, in conjunction with human error models, to develop a framework for the identification and management of potential mismatches.