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Looking forward, it is obvious that there are major challenges facing the nuclear sector globally. These include not only those of new build and decommissioning, terrorist acts and natural disasters, but also the economic pressures from changes in the energy markets. These have led to increased scrutiny of cost-bases and cutbacks and, in some cases, plant closures. At the

same time, global partnerships with both multiple and international contractors have become involved in nuclear projects and activities worldwide. These changes need to be factored in to the ongoing maintenance and development of safety culture. Among other things, managers need to develop the necessary skills to accommodate such multicultural operations. For example, the Finnish power consortium Fennovoima has engaged the Russian building contractor Titan-2 on the preparatory work for its new nuclear power plant at Pyhajoki. Guidance on optimizing the safety culture across these two differing national cultures is clearly essential.

The nuclear sector has also developed a reliance on project structures and multi-tasking teams supported by its supply chain networks during its decommissioning activities. This needs to be critically examined including thinking through the integration of the different subcultures involved and the overall impact of this reliance on safety culture. At the same time, the successful development of a decommissioning mindset together with the management of mindset issues in the decommissioning process are important factors in cultural change. Better educational and support systems are needed to ensure that this style of working is understood and adopted as new technological solutions emerge.

The world of work continues to change and these changes affect working people, the work that they do and how they do it and their employing organizations. Traditional patterns of career and skill development and employment in engineering have changed dramatically over the last three decades and will continue to change. The nuclear sector has not been immune to the effects of such changes. Several of these changes affect the demographic nature of the available workforce that is both ageing and becoming more culturally diverse. The inherent challenges to management and leadership have already been noted. The workforce has become more mobile in terms of both career and skill development, longevity of employment and geography. The latter obviously adding to the cultural mix in any particular country or region [27]. Most jobs require such mobility and also the pattern of demand that they embody is also changing particularly in relation to knowledge load, and continual development, the use of information and communication technology and the requirement for multitasking. There is also an increasing demand for fairness at work that now appears to be central to much of employer–employee relations [31, 32].

These changes and others have led to two things in particular. The first is the need to cultivate nuclear professionalism across the sector in a way that encompasses and takes account of national and international requirements and sensitivities (for example, the National Skills Academy for Nuclear (United Kingdom)). The second is that greater collaboration is required among all key stakeholders and, in particular, the four constituencies already discussed. Effective

collaboration requires communication both with and across organizations. The nature, methods and technology associated with such communications need to be reconsidered.

As part of the drive for professionalization, two issues must be considered and addressed. They are related. The first is creating a just culture in which, for example, the reporting of incidents can be done with reasonable immunity.

Systems that can handle such reporting are well established in the aviation and rail sectors and are available in many nuclear power plants. Second, a just culture, like many other things, depends on trust among those involved and building trust is necessary although not sufficient for a just culture [33]. Building trust, in turn, can depend on perceived fairness at work. Both have been shown to be related to leadership styles and to the existence or otherwise of a just culture [34].

While much of what has been written here naturally concerns management, attention has to be paid to leadership and to leadership with both a small ‘l’ (at all levels) and leadership with a large ‘L’ (at senior levels). To be effective, most types of leadership have to be empowered and empowering and this issue must be addressed in relation to safety culture and management in the nuclear sector as it has elsewhere.

Whatever changes are needed, looking forward, they must be subject to adequate scrutiny and properly evaluated. In respect of safety culture and performance, the desired outcome of all interventions is an improvement in safety performance in all respects and not just the continued avoidance of major incidents. To properly judge whether any particular intervention is achieving this broader objective, it has to be looked at through the lens of real time data directly relating to safety performance.

Finally, there is and has been for some time fundamental questions about the nature of safety culture and its relationship to more general organizational culture. The answers to these two questions have changed over time with more and better research and greater professional experience and it should continue to change as we have more data to work with. The two questions can be expanded.

First, is safety culture a real entity or is it an emergent property of a complex system and, as such, a hypothetical construct? Possibly, we are asking whether you can see, touch and feel it — is it tangible — or whether it is an idea that brings together and summarizes a number of different facets across the various levels of an organization because they have something in common — is it an intangible? Whatever the answer, the concept remains a powerful one in our intellectual armoury for managing nuclear safety, but it does mean that we have to deal with it in a certain way. We have to accommodate the other elements of the system including the nuclear technologies [24].

Second, the question is whether safety culture is a part of the overall organizational culture and reflects that culture in a particular area or whether

it is more independent and may or may not reflect the general organizational culture (see, for example Ref. [6]). Possibly, we are asking here whether the general culture, being good or not so good, weak or strong, is directly reflected in the safety culture or whether the two can be different in these respects. If safety culture does stand differently from the general organizational culture, then there is a clear need to reconcile the two and to ensure the importance of safety throughout the organization. Again, whatever the answer, safety culture remains an important tool for understanding and managing nuclear safety but how we use it, again, depends on the answer given to these questions.