On 30th January 2003, the 46th Safety Caravan visit was held at Mihama Nuclear Power Station Office, The Kansai Electric Power Co., Inc., located in Mihama-cho, Hukui Prefecture.

Safety Presentation

About 70 persons, including the employees of Mihama Nuclear Power Station Office and cooperating companies, attended the Safety Presentation.

At the beginning of the Presentation, Mr. Kokaji, General Manager of Mihama Nuclear Power Station Office, gave an address and said he considered "compliance and creating a workplace with a good climate was extremely important. Today, we have Dr. Fudano from the Kanazawa Institute of Technology to give a lecture, and since we are fortunate enough to have this excellent opportunity to exchange opinions, I want to make this a fruitful Caravan in considering 'What I as an individual should do.'"

After the address, Mr. Tanaka, General Manager of NSnet, introduced NSnet activities. He was followed by Dr. Fudano, Professor, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, who gave a lecture entitled "A Safety Culture towards Building a Corporate Ethics Program and Shared Values", which included case studies concerning the ethics of engineers.

In the lecture he talked about the following points among others:
- Looking into what ethics are, if we look at gaining a balance of various values (e.g. safety, cost, technological novelty, etc.), it should be possible to resolve these ethical issues.
- An organization must build a corporate ethics program with the objective to have common values so that an ethical engineer does not have to whistle-blow.
- In building a corporate ethics system, risk management is extremely effective, and the costs needed to build an ethics program are small compared to losses from accidents, incidents and scandals related to corporate ethics. Generally looking at the large scale picture, building an ethics program is profitable.

Safety information exchange session

At the safety information exchange session, we asked Mr. Nishimura, Safety Management Section, Shika Nuclear Power Station, Hokuriku Electric Power Co. to give an in-depth explanation about the good practices cited by the peer review of the Shika Nuclear Power Station, Hokuriku Electric Power Co., regarding "Establishing and Solidifying Initiatives Taken to Ensure Radiation Level Management."

The main information and opinions exchanged were:
- Concerning accessible emission radiation levels, there is risk to the individual, and self-control is desired, but what can be done in terms of educating employees in order to make people aware so that they can avoid unusable access points?
- For employees, pre-inspection education, slogans and emission level curves at the worksite are being displayed and they are gaining awareness in order to lower access point radiation levels.

Following that, Mr. Kawaguchi, Assistant Station Manager of the Mihama Power Station Office who introduced "Activities to Improve Safety Awareness at the Mihama Nuclear Power Station Office", part of the activities to promote safety culture of The Kansai Electric Power Co.

Mr. Nishimura

Mr. Kawaguchi

*Activities to Promote Safety Culture in the Mihama Nuclear Power Station Office:
Together with being aware of one's own safety culture through safety climate surveys for power station office employees and by raising safety awareness by establishing activity objectives for each person, the activities have the objective of raising the organization's safety culture and have been conducted continuously since 1999. As a part of the "Campaign to Observe the Rules and Create a Workplace with a Good Climate", further enhancement of activities is aimed for with the setting of campaign-oriented activity objectives and so on.