Designing management systems in accordance with the StandAG

The Site Selection Act requires key stakeholders to adopt a science-based, learning-based, and self-critical approach. The requirement for a science-based approach was rooted in the difficult history of selecting the Gorleben site, which involved learning and critical scenarios such as those observed during the Asse mine.

The site selection process, with its timelines from the proposal for the site region for exploration, the exploration itself, to the determination of a repository site, is a highly complex, extensive, and lengthy project fraught with uncertainty. Implementing the Act requires a clear organizational implementation to avoid drift into failure scenarios (Woods, 2006).

The site selection process has a significant time dimension and demands the highest possible level of safety. The current discussion on shortening the project duration is a key trigger for drift into failure. Such discussions make it even more important to structure the organizations of the key players in such a way that a drift into failure will not occur. To achieve this, the key requirements of the Site Selection Act must be implemented on the operational level by the key players.

With the major projects of site selection, construction of the Konrad repository, decommissioning of the Asse II mine, and decommissioning of the Morsleben repository, BGE is responsible for corresponding major projects with project durations of ≥ 20 years at almost every stage of the radioactive waste disposal pathway. The aim of this presentation is therefore to demonstrate how the requirements of the Site Selection Act and the ESK Guidelines on Safety Management (ESK 2021) can be implemented with regard to a science-based, learning, and critical approach in organizational structures, and what special features must be considered with regard to similar large-scale projects abroad.

While safety culture describes the interaction between the actors and all employees within them, safety management addresses organizational control (VDI EE, 2024). Management systems are designed as learning processes (Mayer, 2015). From the perspective of human reliability, the feedback loops of learning are often particularly critical, primarily for two reasons (Sträter, 2019):

• Critical information within an organization is known to the workforce, but is not passed on through the organizational hierarchical levels.
• Conflicting information within the organization is not adequately resolved or is resolved in such a way that safety concerns are not adequately addressed.

The reasons for this include heterogeneous goals between internal and external actors, as well as individual or group-specific preferences (biases) in organizational management (Dierig, 2014; Englisch, 2024; Fritsch, 2025; Geffers, 2016). For effective organizational design, appropriate structures must be created within the organization (Seidel, 2024).

This presentation will examine and discuss the resilient structure of a management system required by the Site Selection Act:                                         

• The "drift into failure" concept and the psychological effects and human/organizational factors that an organization must manage
• The structure of a resilient organizational control system and its differences from traditional organizational control systems

Advantages of an organizational control system for sustainable and long-term safety performance, as well as for accelerating the site selection process