The Safeguards and Organizational Culture Workshop

The Texas A&M INMM Student Chapter, with help from the INMM International Safeguards Technical Division and the Southwest Regional Chapter, conducted a Safeguards Culture Workshop on April 26th-27th, 2016 in College Station, Texas. The participants, who were experts in safeguards and related fields from Austria, Brazil, Hungary, Luxembourg, South Korea, Sweden, and the United States, gathered to explore and define the term “safeguards culture”. Additionally, they assessed the degree to which an organization’s culture can incorporate safeguards and identified research areas that need additional focus. In this workshop, the participants discussed five major topics: (1) the concept of nuclear safeguards culture, (2) lessons learned from safety and security cultures to be applied in nuclear safeguards culture, (3) motivations and incentives to promote nuclear safeguards culture in a facility or regulatory regime, (4) best practices for cultivating nuclear safeguards culture within organizations and member states, and (5) metrics to gauge enhancement of nuclear safeguards culture. This paper presents an overview of the workshop’s proceedings and findings. The overarching conclusion of the participants was that the term “safeguards culture” is ambiguous and may contain different contextual meanings variant on both organizational and individual levels.