Decision to reorganise or reorganising decisions? A First-Hand Account of the Decommissioning of the Phénix Nuclear Power Plant

International audienceThere are already many studies that seek to link the reliability of systems to their host organisation [1, 2, 3, 4]. Although the issues have traditionally been addressed in terms of an a posteriori analysis of crises or disasters [1, 5, 6, 7] a significant body of research has focused on the observation of systems under normal operating conditions, notably the Berkeley researchers who worked on the High Reliability Organization (HRO) project. Other researchers have chosen to observe organisations and their actors in specific phases of operation. This was the strategy selected by Mathilde Bourrier [3] and Pierre Fournier [8, 9], for example, in the context of scheduled nuclear reactor shutdowns. It was also the approach adopted for the study presented here, which looks at the effect of ongoing organisational changes taking place in a nuclear power plant being prepared for decommissioning. This study, conducted between 2010 and 2012, is focused on the Phénix nuclear power plant located at Marcoule in southern France