Human Reliability Analysis to support operational planning of an experimental facility

This paper reports the results obtained by using different techniques of Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) to identify potential operator errors at the SPES (Selective Production of Exotic Species) facility, a second generation Isotope Separation On Line (ISOL) plant for advanced nuclear physic applications. The paper presents scoping-level HRA applications, with the main goal to evaluate the applicability of HRA techniques for the specific domain. In particular, two aspects challenge a standard HRA. First, the facility is under construction so that a number of aspects related to its operation (e.g. procedures and operator interfaces) are still under definition. Second, the context of operation is generally different from those for which HRA techniques have been developed. The operator tasks required during “Ready-to-Beam conditions achievement” operational phase were investigated. At first, a Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) was performed to identify safety-relevant human actions. Then, the SPAR-H and HEART techniques were used in order to characterize the performance conditions and evaluate the Human Error Probabilities (HEPs) of selected operator tasks. Conclusions are derived on the applicability of the techniques for such applications.