Exploring the relationship between safety culture and safety performance in U.S. nuclear power operations

• Safety culture survey administered to 97% of nuclear power plants in United States.
• Factor analysis suggests safety culture is multidimensional with nine distinct factors.
• Safety culture correlated with concurrent and predictive indicators of safety performance.
• Results suggest potential for safety culture to serve as leading indicator of future performance.

How do nuclear power plant workers, within a single national culture, perceive safety culture within their organizations? What is the relationship between safety culture and other indicators of safety? Is the construct of safety culture useful for predicting future plant performance? These questions were addressed in the current study using a survey administered to a sample of personnel at 97% of the nuclear power plants in the United States, resulting in 2876 responses from 63 nuclear power plant sites. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis revealed a multi-factor structure to the safety culture survey. For each nuclear power plant, the mean score for the total survey results and the factor means were correlated with organization-level performance indicators both concurrently and one year following the survey administration. Correlations suggested meaningful, statistically significant relationships between safety culture, as measured by the survey, and multiple nuclear power plant performance indicators. This study presents a unique look at safety culture across the United States nuclear power industry and takes a critical step toward establishing that safety culture is empirically related to safety performance.