Monitoring a Nuclear Power Plant
Monitoring a nuclear power plant (NPP)—even under normal operations—seems like an impossibly difficult attention task. Given that “the limitations of human attention represent one of the formidable bottlenecks in human information processing”, how can anyone possibly perform such a task reliably, day in and day out, as most NPP operators do? This chapter seeks to broaden our understanding of attention in yet another direction through field investigation. It discusses the results of a study on NPP monitoring and demonstrates the rich diversity of information sources used to support attention allocation in an operational context, as well as the clever strategies and devices used by operators to compensate for their limited cognitive resources. The chapter concludes that it is simply not possible to monitor an NPP using attentional resources alone.
Keywords: nuclear power plant, monitoring, attention, operators, attentional resources, information sources
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