[mjvandenbergh]

The American nuclear navy is one of the classic examples of what process safety experts call a High Reliability Organisation. HROs are organisations that run dangerous systems susceptible to so-called "Normal Accidents" while having fewer such accidents than their competitors.

The main things that have been found to contribute to HROs are: A chronic sense of unease even in the face of normal operations - always be thinking of ways to improve safety. A separate engineering standards organisation that is not responsible for operations - i.e. they can order shutdowns without affecting their own job objectives in a way that a plant manager cannot. They do not tolerate the so-called "normalisation of deviance" (which is when out-of-range behaviour becomes accepted as people get used to it.).