Under nuclear energy legislation, the responsibility for nuclear safety lies with the operator of a nuclear installation. ENSI checks whether the operator fulfils this responsibility. It orders all necessary and reasonable measures aimed at preserving nuclear safety. ENSI’s targets mean that its regulatory activities are aimed at ensuring the nuclear installations are safe. To achieve this, a nuclear installation must be comprehensively assessed, and its safety positively influenced through regulatory actions.
However, the safety of a nuclear installation is not only dependent on its technical design. Just as important is the behaviour of the people who operate the installation. The employees of a nuclear installation are part of an organisation whose culture significantly influences their work and thus also the safety of the nuclear installation.
In summary, integrated oversight fulfils three key requirements:
- Effectiveness: ENSI implements decisions consistently and reviews their impact. If necessary, additional actions are taken.The objective of this publication is to present the fundamental assumptions upon which this strategy has been developed, not only for interested members of the public and supervised parties outside of ENSI, but also for the Inspectorate’s own staff.
- Traceability: ENSI has a consistent, integrated regulatory concept and set of regulations and standards. It follows a consistent decision-making process based on clear criteria. The measures mandated by it are transparent and comprehensible.
- Balance: ENSI considers the safety aspects of an installation comprehensively. Alongside the results from deterministic and probabilistic safety analyses, this also includes knowledge of the operation and maintenance as well as organisational workflows. The deployment of resources is prioritised based on the safety relevance of the objects been monitored. Safety requirements and the nature and intensity of monitoring are periodically scrutinised, analysed and, where necessary, adapted.
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After Fukushima, ENSI reviewed its own oversight culture and derived appropriate measures
Analyses of the events in Fukushima revealed that the operator was not solely responsible for the failures in the run-up to the earthquake and tsunami, but rather that the supervisory authorities were also partly responsible. The Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate (ENSI) therefore took this opportunity to review its own oversight culture.