Operators in high-risk industries need to be learning organisations, learning from themselves and from the others. This presentation will describe how the nuclear industry is dealing in an integrated manner with the feedback of operating experience (OE), both internal and external, to increase the safety and reliability of power plants; it will describe how it investigates events reports events and analyses trends shares information to prevent recurrence performs corrective action and training performs assessments to verify effectiveness The plants have achieved great improvements in performance overall, and to improve further, the industry is evolving. Instead of just learning from past events (reactive) it is now focusing on lower level indications of problems (precursors) through low level events reporting, trending and analysis. A hallmark of the industry is its desire to be self-critical. Emphasis is placed on improving the bottom quartile performing plants. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.