Chernobyl as Case Study for Organisational Process Safety
Organisational Process Safety: Taking Process Safety to the Next Level
Over thirty years ago, Unit 4 in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station suffered what is considered the worst incident in the history of nuclear energy. In this paper we analyse the site and the organisation using modern-day process safety techniques.
In this whitepaper we attempt to analyse the process safety practices at the ChNPS using current tools and methodologies, specifically DEKRA’s own Organisational Process Safety (OPS), designed to provide a precise, repeatable and reproducible measure of process safety maturity.
It is not our purpose to analyse the reasons for the incident at Chernobyl, which can be found elsewhere. Rather, we seek to determine whether an OPS assessment could have provided some guidance on improving process safety at the station and helped prevent the incident.
We found that OPS could have provided a clear picture of the process safety maturity of the organisation and, most important, of the interventions needed to improve it and therefore help prevent the incident.