Diana Paola Moreno Alarcon, Ph.D. Candidate at the CRC, attended the Franco-British seminar held by the French Nuclear Energy Society (SFEN) on October 17th, 2018 at the UK embassy in Paris.
The SFEN seminars allow Ph.D. students, researchers and academics from both France and the UK to present and discuss the policy decision-making processes, the representations at work in the choice of nuclear power, and the political contexts specific to each country as both countries have an important nuclear industry and are engaged in nuclear projects.
This year’s SFEN seminar entitled: “The Nuclear Sector: the Human, Social and Ethical Dimensions” was organised into three panels: (1) Nuclear Energy Public Perceptions; (2) Geographical Issues, Comparative Approaches; and (3) Perception of controversial or conflicting issues: waste management, safety.
During the third panel, Diana Paola Moreno Alarcon presented her thesis work “Ensuring Safety in Nuclear Continuity: A case study of Risk Management by prevention and verification management controls on subcontractors in the French Nuclear Industry”. Her work focuses on management control systems (MCS) used in risk and safety management of subcontractors at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). She illustrated on one hand how CEA managers across two nuclear facilities implement strategies (temporal component of management controls, nature of the controls, transition in the ratio of controls) to support and re-enforce MCS currently in place, and on the other hand, the use of safety leadership to re-enforce risk prevention and overcome the limits of MCS in their management of safety and human organizational factors.