# Approaching Nuclear Safety Culture in Fission and Fusion Technology
###### Abstract  
The topic of Nuclear Safety Culture touches several different aspects with contributions from the main organizations involved in nuclear projects and belonging to vendors, utility and regulators. Two nuclear safety directives issued by the European Commission emphasize the fundamental principle of national responsibility for nuclear safety and are implemented in each member country's legislation. An example of fission implementation is highlighted, referring to the Czech Republic legislation; an example of application in fusion technology is the implementation of the Nuclear Safety Culture in the ITER project, located in Cadarache, in the south of France. The aim of the paper is to highlight the importance of this field, pointing out the cross reference between fission and fusion technology as applied in two countries, with concrete experiences and future prospects for nuclear technologies. nuclear safety; Nuclear Safety Culture; fission; fusion +
Footnote †: journal: Nuclear Safety Culture  
The highest level affecting nuclear plant safety is the legislative level, at which the national basis for NS is set. Safety policies and their implementation, promoted at all levels within nuclear organizations, create the working environment and conditions for individual behaviors. All organizations involved in nuclear activities make their responsibilities well known and understood to all staff, with the public commitment of the management to NSC. NSC relies on:  
* The management's commitment to give priority to the safety principles in their decisions;
* The individual responsibility to report with full transparency;
* A questioning attitude (understanding the purposes and knowing the limits of procedures);
* A rigorous and cautious approach for each person--duty of alert exercised;
* The know-how and competences proved by training, accreditation and qualification;
* The person's motivation for setting goals, recognitions and penalties. Figure 1 presents the NSC cycle: the top of the NSC structure is the policy level, secondly managers and finally employees. The structure is presented as a cycle in which there is a continuous feedback between all the levels, because all levels and their interaction must be considered; top-down from the managers and bottom-up from the employers. Open communication is one of the fundamental aspects of NSC and assures the interaction inside and between all levels. The importance to understand safety in order to avoid accidents in nuclear power plants remains one of the key issues for the international expert community [11]. One of the main problems, which was underlined during the severe accidents that happened in the nuclear power plants of TMI [12], Chernobyl [13] and Fukushima Daiichi [14], was the lack of the NSC represented in obsolete design issues, lack of maintenance or emergency operation procedures. As already anticipated, according to the IAEA [15], NSC is the assembly of characteristics and attitudes in organizations and individuals, which establishes that, as an overriding priority, protection and safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance. Although each of the mentioned severe accidents caused a crisis in building new units or in developing future nuclear technology, they provided important information to improve the safety culture in each country that hosts these facilities. For this reason, this topic is in continuous evolution and evaluation worldwide, increasing the reliability of nuclear installations. In the following, particular attention is given to the implementation of the NSC methodologies in fission and fusion installations, where the Czech Republic and ITER [16] are used as examples. The Czech Republic is a country where nuclear installations are already used for electricity production and for research purposes. In addition, new nuclear installations are  
Figure 1: Nuclear Safety Culture (NSC) cycle.