On the 20^th September, Director of Management Systems of Grupo Dominguis, Julián Mendoza, and the Director of Titania, Adoración Arnaldos, atended the technical symposium on “Safe Actions and Nuclear Facilities. Engineering the Human Factor”, which was organized by the Spanish Nuclear Society with the collaboration of ANAV and Tecnatom. The meeting took place at the Centre for Technology and Innovation Transfer of the Fundació Universitat Rovira y Virgili in Tarragona, and the Grupo Dominguis managers who were there emphasized the importance that the holding company places on the safety culture.

During their talk on “Integrating the safety culture into contractor companies”, Mendoza and Arnaldos explained that Grupo Dominguis’s commitment to safety has led it to implement a corporate safety culture to prevent and minimize human error, following INPO/WANO guidelines. This avoids errors that can lead to issues of quality (repetition of tasks, down times), nuclear safety (reportable incidents) or occupational risk (incidents and accidents).

As an example, they gave a presentation on RedER, a pilot programme set up with the involvement of the Lainsa team at the Vandellós II Nuclear Power Plant. This initiative is strongly aligned to the objectives of ANAV’s PROCURA programme (Organizations, Cultural and Technical Reinforcement Plan). To put it into operation, Titania signed an agreement with Human Performance Leadership, a British consultancy with extensive experience in implementing safety culture and human error minimization programmes, both in operators and contractors.

The presentation highlighted the importance of having the contractors develop their own programmes in line with the client’s. This brings considerable added value when it comes to meeting the overall safety goals for the facility as a whole.

The speakers also explained that the idea is to gradually incorporate other Lainsa sites into the programme, following the requirements and directives set by each client in their own programmes.