PROSPER guidelines - Nuclear Safety and Security - IAEA

These guidelines have been developed to provide advice and assistance to utilities or
individual power plants to strengthen and enhance their own operational experience process
through critical self-assessment.
By conducting a critical self-assessment of the process, OE may be optimised, leading to
continuous improvement. This may be achieved through regular effectiveness reviews.
Determination of whether the operational experience processes are being effectively managed,
that the stated expectations and standards are being achieved, maintained, and improvement
sought, and that significant generic issues are being adequately identified and timely rectified
are the major objectives. The IAEA-led PROSPER review utilises the plant self-assessment as
the basis for its evaluation. If a utility operates more than one NPP then it may also be
appropriate to perform a self-assessment at the corporate level.
The objective of an operational experience process is to ensure that all available information
is properly used to improve operational safety. To achieve this objective it is necessary to
ensure that:
• the collection of information in timely manner is sufficiently comprehensive that no
relevant data is lost (this requires broad reporting criteria and low detection thresholds);
• the information collected is screened effectively to ensure that all important safety related
issues, that should be reported and analysed with priority, will actually be identified (this
requires clear ranking criteria);
• the issues identified are analysed in sufficient depth to permit the identification of
underlying root causes with respect to equipment, personnel and procedures,
• the corrective actions are implemented in timely manner to prevent the recurrence of
similar events caused by similar root causes;
• the lessons learned are disseminated promptly and widely to enable other utilities in both
nationally and internationally to take corrective actions before similar events occur.
To ensure that the plant arrangements meet these objectives, it is necessary to carry out
periodic self-assessments.
2.2. AREAS FOR SELF-ASSESSMENT
The guidance has been developed for the following areas of the self-assessment of the OE
process (see more details in Table I):
• strategy,
• organization,
• activities,
• results,
• effectiveness monitoring.
Each self-assessment review area is subdivided into:
• attributes,
• documentation,
• review topics.
The “attributes” subsection gives desirable characteristics of an OE process relating to the
review area.
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